A good workman is known by his tools.
Originally posted by Marc Peabody:
I'm not completely convinced that most enterprise apps have a need for developers to manage their own concurrency.
Web apps all use the server container to manage each request as a separate thread. I only have to worry about my shared state, keeping that thread safe. Not a big a deal.
In essentially all modern JVM implementations, each Java "Thread" object corresponds to a separate scheduling primitive at the operating system level. If the operating system knows how to schedule threads on multiple cores, then that JVM implementation will automatically take advantage of the multiple cores when running multithreaded code. This is not just a Java 5 or 6 thing; it's been true since before consumer multicore processors existed. It's true on multiprocessor motherboards, too.
A good workman is known by his tools.
"Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes" - Edsger Dijkstra
Originally posted by Rusty Shackleford:
Saying the future is multi-cores is over-simplistic.
There are domains where ramping up to 8 or more cores will help greatly, even though it adds complexity to writers or managed code systems and compilers, and in many cases average developers.
However, general use desktop apps do not have much to gain from quad core
"Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes" - Edsger Dijkstra
Originally posted by Rusty Shackleford:
Moore's law is an observation, not an actual law or theory.
The ONLY reason why Intel is pushing it is because the think they need to constantly improve its chips to make more money.
It is not that it is hard to write parallel code, I don't think it is, and I have written programs that can run on 40+ processors, not overly complex ones, but whatever.
Note, that I am discussing desktop apps, there are plenty of cases where systems with many cores is valuable, but they are in areas that the average computer user will likely never hear about it nor need that amount of processing power.
Originally posted by Rusty Shackleford:
Take a word processor, small tasks like spell checkers and whatnot can benefit a little bit, but hardly anything in this browser that I am typing this drivel can.
A good workman is known by his tools.
Huh? Intel's only purpose in life is to make money. They are a corporation. And the make money by releasing ever faster chips, which enable technology to grow. They can't make single CPUs much faster. So there would be no reason for folks to buy new ones. No revenue for Intel.
I was not writing about desktop apps. There are nearly no desktops. For the past decade, I've written only webapps. I see nothing to change that pattern. I believe, IMHO, that less and less will be done on "desktops" and everything will be done with GMail and the equivalent. I could be wrong, but that's where I see the industry going. A "computer" in a few years will be an iPhone using fast wireles networking.
There are nearly no desktops.
"Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes" - Edsger Dijkstra
Originally posted by Rusty Shackleford:
But that doesn't meant that we should buy them.
What display those webapps and where do they live? The average computer user is on the view end of those web apps, and the web programming, like everything else, the hard problems are done by people below you.
I struggle to write a simple compiler and consider compiler writers the top of the CS world(along with OS and soft computing guys), because of the problems they deal with, pipeline, out of order execution, multiple cores, etc. That is tough work, writing a concurrent program(assuming that it is inherently parallel), is nothing like compiler writing.
Originally posted by Rusty Shackleford:
Saying the future is multi-cores is over-simplistic.
Personally, I don't like functional languages, they are too rigid and its proponents are insufferably arrogant and anal-retentive.
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