Thoughts on parallel programming?

[Russel Winder]

On Thu, 2010-11-11 at 18:24 +0100, Tobias Pfaff wrote:
[ . . . ]
> Unfortunately I only know about the standard stuff, OpenMP/OpenCL...
> Speaking of which: Are there any attempts to support lightweight 
> multithreading in D, that is, something like OpenMP ?

I'd hardly call OpenMP lightweight.  I agree that as a meta-notation for
directing the compiler how to insert appropriate code to force
multithreading of certain classes of code, using OpenMP generally beats
manual coding of the threads.  But OpenMP is very Fortran oriented even
though it can be useful for C, and indeed C++ as well.

However, given things like Threading Building Blocks (TBB) and the
functional programming inspired techniques used by Chapel, OpenMP
increasingly looks like a "hack" rather than a solution.

Using parallel versions of for, map, filter, reduce in the language is
probably a better way forward.

Having a D binding to OpenCL (and OpenGL, MPI, etc.) is probably going
to be a good thing.

-- 
Russel.
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Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200   voip: sip:russel.winder at ekiga.net
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