Opportunities for D

[Russel Winder via Digitalmars-d]

On Mon, 2014-08-11 at 11:02 +0000, via Digitalmars-d wrote:
[…]
> Yes, that would be cool, but what do you mean specifically with 
> "dataflow"? Apparently it is used to describe everything from 
> tuple spaces to DSP engines.

I guess it is true that tuple spaces can be dataflow systems, as indeed
can Excel. DSP engines are almost all dataflow exactly because signal
processing is a dataflow problem.

For me, software dataflow architecture is processes with input channels
and output channels where the each process only computes on the receipt
of data ready on some a combination of its inputs. I guess my exemplar
framework is GPars dataflow
http://www.gpars.org/1.0.0/guide/guide/dataflow.html

> I think dataflow in combination with transactional memory 
> (Haswell and newer CPUs) could be a killer feature.

Václav Pech, myself and others been discussing the role of STM but
haven't really come to a conclusion. STM is definitely a great tool for
virtual machine, framework and library developers, but it is not certain
is is a useful general applications tool.

> (I agree that CSP would be too much me too unless you build 
> everything around it.)

I disagree. Actors, dataflow and CSP are all different. Although each
can be constructed from one of the others, true, but it leads to
inefficiencies. It turns out to be better to implement all three
separately based on a lower-level set of primitives.

Technically a CSP implementation has proof obligations to be able to
claim to be CSP. As far as I am aware the only proven implementations
are current JCSP and C++CSP2.

D has the tools needed as shown by std.parallelism. If it could get
actors, CSP and dataflow then it would have something new to tell the
world about to be able to compete in the marketing stakes with Go and
Rust.

-- 
Russel.
=============================================================================
Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200   voip: sip:russel.winder at ekiga.net
41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077   xmpp: russel at winder.org.uk
London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk  skype: russel_winder
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