Parallel Programming

[Nathan Reed]

Pablo Ripolles wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> as many of you have already read, there is an ongoing discussion about the different paradigms/environments/approaches of parallel programming, particularily aimed towards how to exploite the evenly more common multi-core processors.
> 
> http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=214627
> http://blogs.intel.com/research/2007/10/parallel_programming_environme.html
> 
> I'd like to hear about D community point of view!  Is the std.thread our solution? Is there anyone expecting or following another approach?
> 
> Thanks!

Is anyone interested into transactional memory (TM) in D?  TM has a lot 
of overhead with respect to locks when you have a single thread or few 
threads, but it becomes better than locking when you have more threads 
(depending on the problem, of course - for certain problems, locking 
will beat TM no matter how many threads there are).  And TM is far 
easier for mortals to program with than mutexes/locks/monitors/whatever.

There are software TM libraries available for C++ and Java, so I'm sure 
something similiar could be cooked up for D.  If this was part of the 
standard library (or, even better, a built-in part of the language...) 
then I think D could have a big advantage for people who write 
concurrent programs.

Thanks,
Nathan Reed