Thoughts on parallel programming?

[dsimcha]

== Quote from jfd (jfd at nospam.com)'s article
> Any thoughts on parallel programming.  I was looking at something about Chapel
> and X10 languages etc. for parallelism, and it looks interesting.  I know that
> it is still an area of active research, and it is not yet (far from?) done,
> but anyone have thoughts on this as future direction?  Thank you.

Well, there's my std.parallelism library, which is in review for inclusion in
Phobos.  (http://cis.jhu.edu/~dsimcha/d/phobos/std_parallelism.html,
http://www.dsource.org/projects/scrapple/browser/trunk/parallelFuture/std_parallelism.d)


One unfortunate thing about it is that it doesn't use (and actually bypasses) D's
thread isolation system and allows unchecked sharing.  I couldn't think of any way
to create a pedal-to-metal parallelism library that was simultaneously useful,
safe and worked with the language as-is, and I wanted something that worked
**now**, not next year or in D3 or whatever, so I decided to omit safety.

Given that the library is in review, now would be the perfect time to offer any
suggestions on how it can be improved.