On Nov 27, 2011, at 9:51 PM, Debdata wrote: > > I agree that message passing and resource hiding are a great way to go for a > lot of cases, but there are an equally large (Larger?) number of cases > that would benefit from global sharing. Especially when threading for > performance rather than convenience. The cutting edge of high performance > threading is really the task stealing approach. See intel's TBB, cilk, etc. > Implementing things like that would become unnecessarily verbose as most > things will be shared and we have to keep tagging.
This is more the domain of std.parallelism and it's quite useful, but each have their strengths. For one, message-based concurrency can scale horizontally across machines if done correctly (see Erlang, for instance), which can be a huge win. Also, I find it to be a much easier model to develop for. The work-stealing and similar models expose some of the details of threading and concurrency by necessity, which means that the programmer has to think about this and craft the code appropriately. I think this model will be progressively less common as time goes on.
