Getting locks and sharing: was RE: Getting concurrency

[Vance Shipley]

On Wed, Jun 15, 2005 at 08:18:36AM -0500, James Hague wrote:
}  
}  I agree.  With AMD and Intel both pushing multiple cores on one chip,
}  this looks like the time to resurrect the multi-CPU Erlang research. 
}  I fully expect that *all* desktops will have multiple CPUs within the

I'm convinced that the next ten years will see huge advances in 
parallelism.  Sun's Niagra 32 way chip will ship soon.  IBM et. al.
have their cell processor.  The low hanging fruit in performance
gains is in adding parallel execution paths.  I'm not talking dual
CPU here but dozens or hundreds.  Today's software industry isn't
ready for that. 

It is inevitable that there will be a ground swell of interest in 
concurrency oriented programming languages.  On the one hand I think
Erlang stands a chance of gaining serious mind share.  On the other
hand the single threaded emulator will be seen as making the whole
point moot.

If Erlang doesn't deliver the goods new COPL language(s) will arise
to solve the problem.  That may well be a good thing but it would 
be a shame to see Erlang be passed by entirely.

Maybe what we need in the short term is a wrapper application which
takes care of creating nodes, binding them to virtual processors and
generally making distribution transparent.

	-Vance