On Tue, Apr 3, 2012 at 9:46 AM, Miles Fidelman <[email protected]>wrote:
> > And for that matter, driving a car, playing a sport, walking and chewing > gum at the same time :-) Would this be a Flintstones racecar? > > >> I can think of a lot of single-threaded interfaces that put people in a >> universe of pain. It isn't clear to me that distribution is at fault there. >> ;) >> >> > Come to think of it, tracing flow-of-control through an object-oriented > system REALLY is a universe of pain (consider the difference between a > simulation - say a massively multiplayer game - where each entity is > modeled as an object, with one or two threads winding their way through > every object, 20 times a second; vs. modeling each entity as a > process/actor). > Control flow is a source of much implicit state and accidental complexity. A step processing approach at 20Hz isn't all bad, though, since at least you can understand the behavior of each frame in terms of the current graph of objects. The only problem with it is that this technique doesn't scale. There are easily up to 15 orders of magnitude in update frequency between slow-updating and fast-updating data structures. Object graphs are similarly heterogeneous in many other dimensions - trust and security policy, for example. I think the parallel programming models of the future will look more like Dedalus, Bloom, synchronous reactive, or concurrent constraint programming. Or my reactive demand programming. Dataflows, with lots of isolation for modularity and security. We can still model control flow where essential, but it isn't often essential. Regards, Dave -- bringing s-words to a pen fight
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