concurrency

[Daniel Lewis]

Craig Black Wrote:
> Walter also has said recently that he wants to implement automatic 
> parallelization, and is working on features to will support this (const, 
> invariant, pure).  I think Andrei is pushing this.  I have my doubts that 
> this will be useful for most programs.  I think that to leverage this 
> automatic parallelization, you will have to code in a functional style, or 
> build your application using pure functions.  Granularity will also probably 
> be an issue.  Because of these drawbacks, automatic parallelization may not 
> be so automatic, but may require careful programming, just like manual 
> parallelization.  But maybe I'm wrong and it will be the greatest thing 
> ever.
> 
> -Craig 
> 

Craig, I'm not sure if you noticed that AMD and Intel had "HT" for a long time and are now pushing multicore on desktop users now, as well as servers.  Const and pure are also relevant to live application migration, embedded application interfacing, optimization, and debugging.

D is moving towards supporting some assertions that data isn't changed by an algorithm, and/or that it must not be changed.  That doesn't require any more work than deciding whether something should be constant, and then making it compile.

I really have no idea what the approach will be for parallelization, but if Walter's waiting for C++ to figure it out then it'll be better than what they have.

Regards,
Dan