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The Impact of Multi-Core CPUs on Developers

16 replies on 2 pages. Most recent reply: Aug 11, 2006 7:23 AM by Fireblaze .

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Jules Jacobs

Posts: 119
Nickname: jules2
Registered: Mar, 2006

Re: The Impact of Multi-Core CPUs on Developers

Posted: Aug 3, 2006 10:49 AM

Java (and C, C#, etc) probably won't survive multi-core CPU's for too long. Once we have 16+ cores Java applications will be very slow compared to Haskell, because parallelism has to be explicit in Java. Haskell, on the other hand, can be parallelised automatically by a compiler.

:)

Fireblaze .

Posts: 21
Nickname: fireblaze
Registered: Jul, 2006

Re: The Impact of Multi-Core CPUs on Developers

Posted: Aug 11, 2006 7:23 AM

This issue explored in
"The Free Lunch Is Over: A Fundamental Turn Toward Concurrency in Software" posted March 2005.
http://www.gotw.ca/publications/concurrency-ddj.htm

Its good that java got it concurrent-package, but look where they put it "java.util.concurrent" under utilities. A concurrent software need concurrency at is core.
I hope Java and other languages will implement the basic-text-book-examples of concurrent things, like ThreadPools, WorkerPools, ResourcePools.

All developers that use Swing uses threading implicitly since there is a SwingEventThread and a MainThread running, hopefully it will be that simple to say that you want something else running in another thread

Example is:


@GuiThread{"edt"}
public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent e) {
  String text = readHugeFile();
  textArea.setText(text);
}

@NonGuiThread
private String readHugeFile() {
  ...
}

http://jroller.com/page/dmdevito?entry=foxtrot_library_another_look_at

Even nicer would be if you could just type


public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent e) {
  String text = readHugeFile();
  textArea.setText(text);
}

private background String readHugeFile() {
  ...
}

or something that like that.

One challange is to turn a singlethreaded code into multithreaded
like:
readHugeFile();
readRssFeeds();
readEmail();
transforeAllReadStuff();
into making them run concurrently and then transform them when they are done.
background: readHugeFile();
background: readRssFeeds();
background: readEmail();
wait: transforeAllReadStuff();

Having a lanuage and libraries that support concurrency simplify and often make it possible to even to begin use concurrency.

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