[TUHS] PDP-11 legacy, C, and modern architectures

[Perry E. Metzger]

On Thu, 28 Jun 2018 12:45:39 -0400 Paul Winalski
<paul.winalski at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 6/28/18, Theodore Y. Ts'o <tytso at mit.edu> wrote:
> >
> > It's the same mistake
> > Chisnall made when he assrted the parallel programming a myth that
> > humans writing parallel programs was "hard", and "all you needed"
> > was the right language.  
> 
> I''ve heard the "all you need is the right language" solution to the
> parallel processing development problem since I joined DEC in 1980.
> Here we are in 2018 and nobody's found that "right language" yet.

Dunno. Rust does some amazing things because it has a linear type
system, which means both that it can be a fully safe language even
though it doesn't have a garbage collector, and that it can allow
sharing of memory without any fear of multiple writers touching the
same block of memory.

I used to think that there hadn't been much progress in computer
science in decades and then I fell down the rabbit hole of modern
type theory. The evolution of type systems over the last few decades
has changed the game in a lot of ways. Most people aren't aware of
the progress that has been made, which is a shame.

> There have been some advancements in software development tools to
> make parallel programming easier.  Modern compilers are getting
> pretty good at loop analysis to discover opportunities for parallel
> execution and vectorization in sequentially-written code.

You're not mentioning things like linear types, effect systems, etc.

Perry
-- 
Perry E. Metzger		perry at piermont.com