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March 6, 2008
Concurrency at SD West: Herb Sutter
I'm here at the SD West Conference in Santa Clara, CA, where droves of software developers are immersing themselves in everything from programming language specifics to project management methodologies.
I sat in on Herb Sutter's talk on migrating code to the "manycore free lunch," as he puts it. This is part of a two-day C++ session he jointly hosted with the witty and ever-so-slightly acerbic Bjarne Stroustrup (the creator of C++).
I'll report in more detail elsewhere on this portal about Herb's talk, as well as my interview with him. The audience sat in rapt attention through the concurrency talks and Sutter's sizzling eight-core demo that highlighted the importance of data locality. But if the audience questions are any indication, concurrency looms on an as-yet unfocused horizon for many.
Here are a smattering of the questions I heard:
"When should my company jump into concurrency?"
"When will the tools stabilize?"
"Should I wait for the chip makers to iron out how to program on multi-core?"
"How much input do the chip makers have with the C++0x concurrency model?"
"Does Intel understand software developers?"
According to Sutter, more than half of the C++ special session attendees were planning to implement apps in the near future that would run on eight or more cores.
But at the other end of the spectrum, Extreme Programming, Agile and OO methodology gurus such as Joshua Kerievsky of Industrial Logic and Robert Martin of Object Mentor told me that while agility continues to gain traction, concurrency was not yet a concern for their training and consulting businesses.
I'll have more for you tomorrow...
Posted by Alexandra Weber Morales on March 6, 2008 2:39 AM