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

[Maciej Sobczak <no.spam@no.spam.com>]

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. ;)


-- 
Maciej Sobczak : http://www.msobczak.com/
Programming    : http://www.msobczak.com/prog/