On Thu, 28 Jun 2018 12:45:39 -0400 Paul Winalski
<paul.winalski(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 6/28/18, Theodore Y. Ts'o
<tytso(a)mit.edu> wrote:
It's the same mistake
Chisnall made when he assrted the parallel programming a myth that
humans writing parallel programs was "hard", and "all you needed"
was the right language.
I''ve heard the "all you need is the right language" solution to the
parallel processing development problem since I joined DEC in 1980.
Here we are in 2018 and nobody's found that "right language" yet.
Dunno. Rust does some amazing things because it has a linear type
system, which means both that it can be a fully safe language even
though it doesn't have a garbage collector, and that it can allow
sharing of memory without any fear of multiple writers touching the
same block of memory.
I used to think that there hadn't been much progress in computer
science in decades and then I fell down the rabbit hole of modern
type theory. The evolution of type systems over the last few decades
has changed the game in a lot of ways. Most people aren't aware of
the progress that has been made, which is a shame.
There have been some advancements in software
development tools to
make parallel programming easier. Modern compilers are getting
pretty good at loop analysis to discover opportunities for parallel
execution and vectorization in sequentially-written code.
You're not mentioning things like linear types, effect systems, etc.
Perry
--
Perry E. Metzger perry(a)piermont.com