The future of concurrent programming

[Dave]

freeagle wrote:
> Why do people think there is a need for another language/paradigm to 
> solve concurrent problem? OSes deal with parallelism for decades, 
> without special purpose languages. Just plain C, C++. Just check Task 
> manager in windows and you'll notice there's about 100+ threads running.
> If microsoft can manage it with current languages, why we cant?
> 
> freeagle

That's a good point... Services and daemons have been running on multi-cpu machines for years, and 
AFAICT even multi-core machines prior to Intel Core 2 didn't require "a whole new paradigm" [or even 
a whole new compiler or new libraries].

For language support, Java, its runtime and std. lib. for example were designed with concurrency in 
mind and I'm not so sure much more can reasonably be done with an imperative language (although I'm 
sure some improvements could be made).

How will the new Intel chip architecture really drastically change that? I recently read an article 
that many server applications are already "close to ideally suited" to the new CPU architectures, 
and "should immediately benefit" from them.

(If they can "immediately benefit" from the multi-core designs, then it's not a leap to suppose that 
these "old" techniques must still hold a good deal of merit. Why re-invent the wheel?).

Sure, there are some areas like "lock-free hastables", theading libs. and such that will need to be 
done differently to get the _most_ benefit from the new architectures, but I don't think it will or 
need to go much beyond that (I'm not so sure that other more complex things like Garbage Collection 
will need to be re-developed to take advantage of multi-core).

What I think will need to change for the most part will be how _some_ "fat client" applications are 
developed, but that is becoming less relevant in this era of "thin-client" computing. IIS, Apache, 
Oracle, SQL Server and the rest take care of most of the concurrent operation worries for us <g> 
OTOH, maybe multi-core becoming available on a typical client will create a resurgence of demand for 
"fat-client".

- Dave