On 12/27/10 2:34 PM, foobar wrote:
Andrei Alexandrescu Wrote:
It's currently a growing niche as sequential speed doesn't scale anymore
by Moore's law. Depending on the interplay of discoveries in the coming
years, I believe it's not impossible that serial languages that spend
CPU cycles on dynamic interpretation might become a historical curiosity
caused by a fleeting context: (a) serial speed is large enough to allow
wasting some of it, (b) I/O is much slower than CPU and dominates the
performance profile of many programs, (c) many of today's computing
needs are materially covered with relatively little CPU effort. Any and
all such conditions may change in the future.
Andrei
No one can predict the future, but I feel that your conclusion is in conflict
with your above description. Because sequential speed does not scale, there is
a search for non sequential solutions. Those steer _away_ from hand managed
systems languages that make such programming harder. In fact, it makes even
more sense to go dynamic to adapt the code for different platforms and
scenarios.
Erlang is an excellent example and is dynamic.
Good point. Yet Erlang's dynamism has little to do with its concurrency
capabilities and more to do with hot swapping.
At any rate, the current crop of successful dynamic languages (Ruby,
Python, PHP) seem to be worse equipped than the current statically-typed
languages (Java, C++0x), which are rather ill-prepared themselves. I
hope I placed a winning bet with D's NDS (no-default-sharing)
concurrency model; only time will tell.
Andrei
