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I like "Thread sucks" part but can't agree with your comment on that there's no need for threads.
we do real time apps where screens can't freeze up, so many times, we send a job to background thread pool (calc, data fetch...etc) so UI remains responsive. Until the thread job is done, data comes back to UI thread where it's binded to UI synchronously.
dev
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devvvy wrote: but can't agree with your comment on that there's no need for threads.
Well if you put it like that, I don't agree with myself either 
Like you say, they're nice for asynchronous programming too. This was a thread about 48 cores and how they might be used though - threads suck in the context of keeping all those cores fed.
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That is not a language feature, that is a framework feature. You could say that async is a language feature, so maybe in that case. What you want is a language to state the program so that its parallellism can be determined and used. If the language was truly parallel friendly you would not even have to think about threads or background, or anything like that. That you do is the problem.
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Thread is an OS feature, not a framework feature. System.Threading.Thread just happens to use kernel32::CreateThread to implement the required functionality.
Using the same logic, we shouldn't use C# to add 1 plus 1 because Int32 is declared and implemented in CLR and not a C# feature xD
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What do you mean by C# not being designed to handle all the cores? As of .NET 4, parallel programming in C# became relatively straight forward. Link[^].
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Even TPL CTP1 worked like a charm in 3.5 ^^
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C# has some tools to help from the TPL, but it does not automatically handle multiple cores. It requires some programmer intervension, and it is not C# that does this, but the framework.
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Indeed it does, but if you use TPL and the other features of the framework then you have multi core capability. Your post seemed to suggest that you couldn't do this right now, which is why I posted.
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Agreed, I could have stated it better. LINQ with TPL is a great case of providing a way to easily put in parallelism. But to use all those cores effectively for most for most programs would require a applications to be broken up into a hell of a lot of tasks, and the programmer would have to do a lot of work to figure out what could be done in parallel. Many scientific applciations would be fairly easy, but most applications this is not the case.
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Clifford Nelson wrote: But to use all those cores effectively for most for most programs would require
a applications to be broken up into a hell of a lot of tasks, and the programmer
would have to do a lot of work to figure out what could be done in parallel
Indeed. There are a lot of applications where this could be done, but the big issue is that a lot of developers aren't aware of the nuances of parallel programming, so they end up doing it badly (or they don't do it at all).
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As I stated I could have stated it better. It was right to post since it managed to bring out the issues with wording in my original statement. My Master's Degree was in Computer Engineering, so I became familiar with the issues of massively parallel computers. Programming Crays is not easy, nor any of the other massively parallel computers. That is why we have not seen a lot of them. 240 cores
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I learned the craft of parallelism when I was working in the Oil and Gas industry many years ago. You had to do it right, or the consequences could be disastrous.
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I never had to do it, but read enough about the problems.
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As stated earlier, TPL is a framework feature, not really a language feature. You still have to state it instead of inferring it. Things are getting better, but still to use massive parallelism would require a lot more work. The async keyword may make a difference. What TPL does so well is throttle things so that the system does not start thrashing due to too many threads. What you want is not to even have to worry about it, like now with memory management.
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Those threads are separate programs. Yes you can run separate programs easily on different threads, the OS handles that, and the applications are independent. Of course trying to coordinate all these programs efficiently would be a problem since would have to use cross application communication. Now I want to parallelize every aspect of your specific application so that your one application will effectively use 240 cores, or even a million cores. Good Luck. If you can do it then they should hire you to program the Titan, you obviously are perfect for the job since you must be an Einstein.
C++ is really not much different from C# (or C for that matter). It is the framework generally that provides access to the treading. Yes with 4.5 there is the async keyword, but that is really it. Unsafe is realive. Perfect programming would make any "unsafe" code safe.
If you had 240 cores, do you think your current PC software would be using them efficiently? That is the issue.
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I suspect that things will morph with time. We are already seeing it with things like LINQ. Programmers cannot deal with the details of threads and be efficient. Just like they could not deal with Memory Management and be efficient; Using Garbage Collection produces overhead that could be eliminated if people did thier own memory management.
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Terrence Dorsey wrote: we could finally do things that take way too much processing power today," said Patrick Moorhead, an analyst with Moor Insights and Strategy
and what are these "things" that M. Patrick Dickhead analyst at dick insights "could finally do" ? Does he have any plan for launching a rocket but is symptomatically blocked due to the lack of power of his iphone????
Seulement, dans certains cas, n'est-ce pas, on n'entend guère que ce qu'on désire entendre et ce qui vous arrange le mieux... [^]
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One processor can do the work and 47 processors can do garbage collection! 
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Windows Phone 8 is here, and with it comes new and exciting devices, along with more markets and languages, making it easier than ever to build great apps for a larger audience. See what’s new in the SDK. Download it today and get started building your WP8 apps.
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Erlang was created to run on a variety of systems. Riak (written in Erlang) was created as a fault-tolerant distributed datastore, able to run on commodity hardware. Raspberry Pi is the culmination of these two points, brought to an absurd level: an embedded(ish), very inexpensive ($35) commodity computer. I thought it might be fun to create a Riak cluster on a set of Pis I had lying around. Here’s what you’ll need to build your own RiakPi cluster...
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It's always up for debate how useful these projects are in the thick of a storm. Even the nicest web application isn't foremost in the mind of someone who is without power or Internet access. Regardless of the impact during the storm, though, keep an eye on how people like WNYC's John Keefe use their web skills to explain the hurricane. Over the past couple of years, it's become a lot easier to design, build and launch web-based interactive mapping applications on short turnaround thanks to advances from companies like CartoDB, which Keefe has been using to build maps for WNYC, and MapBox. All your Frankenstorm are belong to us.
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The good news about Erlang can be summed up at this: Erlang is the culmination of twenty-five years of correct design decisions in the language and platform. Whenever I've wondered about how something in Erlang works, I have never disappointed in the answer. I almost always leave with the impression that the designers did the “right thing.” I suppose this is in contrast to Java, which does the pedantic thing, Perl, which does the kludgy thing, Ruby, which has two independent implementations of the wrong thing, and C, which doesn't do anything. The language is slow, awkward, and ugly. Refactoring Erlang code is a pain. But I love it anyway.
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The free games that have been included with the various versions of Windows over the years occupy a unique position in the video game landscape. No one would include them on a list of the best or most influential games of all time, and it’s unlikely any of them have ever acted as a “system seller” to influence someone’s choice of OS. Yet over the past decade, games like Microsoft’s Solitaire, Minesweeper, and Mahjong may be the most widely played video games on any platform... you’re unlikely to find a PC user that hasn’t at least tried these titles at one point or another. The free game tradition continues with Windows 8. Here's what you'll find.
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