bearophile wrote:
Andrei Alexandrescu:
Not all shared data is immutable. Data marked as "shared" is
shared. The cool thing is that D switches the default to the
"right" default.
The style of programming in which you create a new thread that
joyously sees and can modify *all* of the memory space available to
every other thread will go the way of the dinosaur. It's just not
tenable anymore, and I predict today's mainstream programming
languages abiding to that model are facing major troubles in the
near future.
I agree.
Also, take a look at Clojure, one of the very few languages designed
to manage multi-core CPUs. In Clojure you can use mutable data and
data structures, but the default is immutable data. They argue that's
the "right" default if you want to program for multi-core CPUs. If
this and the Clojure experiment turn out as true/right, D2/D3 may
have to change more :-)
Or Clojure. (I'm not even kidding. D has a very compelling computation
model that beats the pants off traditional functional approaches.)
The thing is, in a few short years "if you want to program for
multi-core CPUs" will sound as funny as "if you want to program for CPUs
with more than 16-bit addressing" sounds today. Yet it was a valid
qualification to add in the past, when 32- and 64-bit systems were a rarity.
In the close future D std lib may enjoy to grow several immutable
data structures (finger trees, etc), even if the D2 language &
community on the whole has not embraced the immutability much yet.
Such data structures and other features in the std lib can't hurt.
We'll surely talk more about this topic.
Looking forward to your contributions to Phobos. Just drop
pass-by-delegate like a bad habit. :o)
Andrei
