Re: Isn't this in favour of Ada??

[Erlo Haugen <"elh whirlpool terma spot com">]

Maciej Sobczak wrote:
> Erlo Haugen wrote:
> 
>> http://www.gotw.ca/publications/concurrency-ddj.htm
>>
>> I think so.
> 
> 
> I don't think so. I mean - the article is neutral with regard to Ada, 
> and not only because it does not mention "Ada" at all.
> 
> The article is about the fact that future hardware platforms will tend 
> to have more and more parallelism, no matter whether this will be used 
> by software or not. Actually, this happens already, even on popular 
> desktop platforms.
> The problem that you seem to forget about is that all the factors that 
> are used today for choosing the language (some factors are technical, 
> some not, but that does not matter) will be still in use tomorrow. For 
> example, if some project chooses Java, it does so independent of whether 
> the program will be running on Hyper Threading processor or not - so the 
> increased concurrency capabilities of the target platform has no impact 
> on the language chosen for implementation. In general, programmers will 
> not rush to change their languages just because the multicore CPUs will 
> become prevalent. This article is therefore about raising the awareness 
> of programmers that concurrency is the only way to benefit from new 
> hardware, which is very far from saying that people should move to 
> another language - be it Ada or whatever else. And since the author is 
> involved in the C++ standardization process, I'd rather read this 
> article as a "good-source" prediction that more effort will be put into 
> standardizing the relation between C++ and multithreading (which already 
> happens).
> 
> The *only* way it could be in favour of Ada is to reuse the experience 
> of the Ada community when defining threading for C++ (I'm not sure 
> whether this will be the case or not), but I don't think that this kind 
> of "favour" is what you really mean. ;)
> 
> 
What i meant to say was that Ada already has the features needed to take 
advantage of this increasing parallelism, be it hyperthreading og 
multiple processors, and doing it in a portable way. Threading 
possibilities are already supplied by most OSes, but by incorporating it 
as a language standard, it becomes portable.

-- 
Erlo
-----

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