Upcoming article in Dr. Dobbs'

[James Hague]

> "The Free Lunch Is Over: A Fundamental Turn Toward Concurrency in
> Software
> 
> The biggest sea change in software development since the OO revolution
> is knocking at the door, and its name is Concurrency."

But is Erlang a solution to the problem he talks about?  Let's say 
that in a couple of years the standard desktop box ships with CPUs  
containing four to eight processors on one chip.  Current Erlang 
implementations won't make use of all those processors, as the 
emulator does the bulk of its work in one thread.  You could fire up 
eight emulators at once and go distributed from the start, but then 
you still need to manually do some kind of load balancing, to make 
sure that the work is truly split up among the eight.  And goes 
against the grain of the work toward a shared-heap architecture, too.

I'd love to see a way of having Erlang automatically make use of 
multiple CPUs on the same box.  That would provide *huge* wins.

James