

Ask HN:Intel's Array Building Blocks(was Rapidmind):What do the purists think? - keveman

Increasing programmer productivity has been a grand challenge since time immemorial. In current times, every program written has to be parallel to take advantage of many core processors. The next great parallel programming language is still waiting to get invented. With Array Building Blocks (ArBB), Intel has taken a library based approach to parallel programming. ArBB uses a mix of clever C++ operator overloading and arguably ugly preprocessor macros like _if, _for, etc to mimic C keywords to let programmers express parallel programs. People who know what they are doing could indeed write portable and scalable programs with ArBB. However, novice programmers could easily trip themselves because of the fragile nature of the macros. So what do language purists out there think? Is it wise to promote such unsafe approaches to parallel programming?
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keveman
Here is a link to ArBB website : [http://software.intel.com/en-
us/articles/intel-array-buildin...](http://software.intel.com/en-
us/articles/intel-array-building-blocks/)

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wmf
Intel has a larger problem: they have OpenMP, OpenCL, TBB, ABB, and Cilk. In
what situation should I use which tool?

