[erlang-questions] Parallel Shootout & a style question

[Benjamin Tolputt]

Mats Cronqvist wrote:
> in the near future, we'll be using CPU's with 100's or 1000's of 
> cores. see e.g. this;
>
> http://www.sics.se/multicore08_abstracts_bios
>
>   on such hardware, it'll be (almost) completely uninteresting how much 
> CPU time we spend. the important thing will be to parallelize 
> everything, and we can take for granted that parallel execution will 
> "pay off". software technologies that doesn't makes this happen under 
> the hood will be the COBOL of 2010's.
>   
The issue is that taking the direction you suggest *right now* will have
the effect of making Erlang slower for most tasks on most platforms it
is currently deployed on. I agree that, in the future (near or far is
debatable), Erlang is best situated to take advantage of the surplus of
CPU power available from many-core systems. At that time, it would be
advantageous to make have the OTP make parralel a substantial number of
it's list comprehensions. As of *right now* however, we're looking at
deployment on single, dual, & quad cores mostly. At this point, we DO
need to consider the total CPU dedicated to the task.

--Ben