
Parallel Programming: I Told You So - linuxmag
http://www.linux-mag.com/id/7526
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scott_s
I don't see any reason to claim "I told you so."

For decades, parallel programming was only done by people in the high
performance world. It was (is) difficult and often painful. The languages,
APIs and paradigms were broken in various ways. But they got the job done, and
the relatively few people who actually needed to do it were able to.

It's only now that parallel programming is moving into the mainstream. Hence,
it's only now that it's worthwhile for computing as a field and an industry to
pour the resources into making parallel programming "easier." The benefit from
doing it before was marginal.

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JulianMorrison
More interesting details here: <http://thirdcog.eu/pwcblocks/>

You get read-only access to stack variables, read-write access to stack
variables defined with __block, and you have to copy the block explicitly to
the heap if you want to call it outside of its scope, and then manually free
it.

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JulianMorrison
"C blocks" == closures?

~~~
silentbicycle
They're immutable, though. (For sake of parallelization.)

~~~
eru
Proper closures in a pure language are immutable, too.

~~~
silentbicycle
Well, sure, but that's not usually what people are talking about when they
mean closures.

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jamesk2
"Some simple algorithms can be developed that allow remote cores (other nodes)
or even heterogeneous cores (different types of nodes) to be used by the
program."

Does this mean blocks and GCD would allow easier cluster and cloud computing
too? Or maybe use all the CPUs in a household to complete tasks?

