A Trifle Absurd

Concurrency is Coming

14 April 2006 at 16.09 • in Languages, Programming

This iMac I’m using is my last uniprocessor computer. After decades of predictions about parallelism, the multiprocessor machine is finally going mainstream. And now that multiple cores fit on a single chip, they’re going to multiply at a Moore’s-law pace.

So it’s about time we figured out how to do concurrent programming. OS-process parallelism can spread the load over a few cores; OS-thread parallelism can do a bit more; but how is your app going to handle a couple dozen cores a few years hence? Shared-state concurrency as practiced these days isn’t going to cut it. (But you’ve heard this already…)

We’re starting to see programming languages that take that challenge seriously. Erlang is the best-known example, though there are others: Haskell (with STM) and Oz come to mind.

In a few spare moments (my nearest equivalent to “spare time”), I’ve been hatching up ideas for a little highly-concurrent language of my own. I doubt anything will come of it before I ship Trifle, but then, who knows? I might add something to the towering babble of computer languages.