Eric Bron (eric.bron.delete@this.zvisuel.privatefortest.com) on December 6, 2014 2:42 am wrote:
>
> or people using DAGs to explain why reference count is a solid
> solution when complex object graphs typically have cycles

Oh, I agree. My example was the simple case. The really complex cases are much worse.

I seriously don't believe that the future is parallel. People who think you can solve it with compilers or programming languages (or better programmers) are so far out to lunch that it's not even funny.

Parallelism works well in simplified cases with fairly clear interfaces and models. You find parallelism in servers with independent queries, in HPC, in kernels, in databases. And even there, people work really hard to make it work at all, and tend to expressly limit their models to be more amenable to it (eg databases do some things much better than others, so DB admins make sure that they lay out their data in order to cater to the limitations).

Of course, other programming models can work. Neural networks are inherently very parallel indeed. And you don't need smarter programmers to program them either..

Linus