retard wrote:
Fri, 08 Jan 2010 00:50:26 -0800, Walter Bright wrote:
Michel Fortin wrote:
Also keep in mind that we don't really need a shared vision among
everyone. What's needed is someone who takes the decisions. Discussion
is only needed to help that person take the right decisions. Although
consensus among all members certainly boosts the decider
self-confidence, it is not required, and not necessarily desirable
either. A consensus among only a few key people is all that is needed,
and this has little to do with who is allowed to raise issues and
propose solutions.
The real problem with a concurrency model is that very few programmers
understand the issues. The failed Java concurrency model is an example
of this shortage. For another, about 5 years ago I attended a panel of
30 of the top C++ experts in the world to discuss a concurrency model
for C++0x.
It didn't take long for it to become obvious that exactly two people
understood the issues - Hans Boehm and Herb Sutter. The rest of us sat
there slack-jawed and drooling, asking endless inane questions. I wish I
had the patience Hans and Herb showed in dealing with this.
Since then I have tried to master this topic, but I don't have much
experience writing complex multithreaded code. So what we need are
people who are experienced with MT code who can evaluate the design to
see if we missed the boat or not. I'd rather not shoot at the moon yet
wind up orbiting some asteroid.
If only 2 of the top 30 c++ experts understand concurrency models, what
makes you think that D programming community, mostly consisting of novice/
hobbyist/student programmers have any better luck? There are only a
handful of such experts as Sean, Andrei, Bartosz, Brad et al here. The D
community is maybe 3 to 4 orders of magnitude smaller than the global C++
community. Only a handful of enterprises use D and there is basically no
academic research happening around D.
Our flagship for communicating across concurrent entities is message
passing, which is much more palatable than classic share-the-world
concurrency models.
I'm very excited about how this is coming together.
Andrei
