Wednesday 17 October 2007

PFX, PLINQ and TPL

You must take a look at the Programming in the Age of Concurrency by Anders Hejlsberg and Joe Duffy: Concurrent Programming with PFX posted on Channel 9...

It is great to see this natural, one would think, progression of lambdas into task managing, which no doubt will be simplifying concurrent implementations. Think mutexes, semaphores, critical sections, monitors, locks, threads etc. being hidden behind API simply accepting lambdas expressing your execution requirements. The same with workload control and optimization. This looks fantastic.

Here are some more links to Joe's articles, simply copied from his blog:
  1. Parallel LINQ: Running Queries on Multi-Core Processors. An overview of an implementation of LINQ-to-Objects and -XML which automagically uses data parallelism internally to execute declarative language queries. It supports the full set of LINQ operators, and several ways of consuming output in parallel.
  2. Parallel Performance: Optimize Managed Code for Multi-Core Machines. Describes the Task Parallel Library (TPL), a new "thread pool on steroids" with cancellation, waiting, and pool isolation support, among many other things. Uses dynamic work stealing techniques (see here and here) for superior scalability.

By being declarative and not over specifying, isn't functional approach way for the future?

PS. Have you tried F#, which just went into production?

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