Is concurrency hard?

[Matthias Lang]

Ulf Wiger writes:

 > Most attempts to exploit concurrency in hardware seem to have been
 > severely limited by what software designers were ready/willing to
 > cope with. The current shift to multicore is driven by the apparent
 > fact that we've exploited all other known alternative routes to high
 > performance. Time then to force programmers to re-think. Luckily
 > for Erlangers, the mental shift shouldn't be that traumatic.

I do not expect Erlang to far outshine other languages on multicore
machines. Erlang hasn't made a splash in applications designed to run
on multi-CPU machines and I see no huge difference* between multi-CPU
and multi-core.

The main benefit of using Erlang will continue to be that you get a
significantly simpler program for some types of problem. Most of the
time, the aspect of the problem which benefits the most from Erlang's
concurrency will not be concurrency in the underlying hardware.

Matthias

 * Ok, I'll try harder: multicore machines seem more likely to become
   widespread than multi-CPU machines.