More multicore stuff

I was happy to read Tim Bray’s summary of the challenges that software developers, from kernel hackers to the guys behind iMovie, are going to face in the upcoming era of mainstream multicore CPUs. People need to start thinking about this stuff now, and in typical fashion, Tim gets right down to it:

This doesn’t mean it’s easy. My Zeppelin project has client-side and server-side code, and both sides are highly parallel; it has been a complete fucking nightmare to debug, and I claim to be good at debugging. If we’re going to empower application programmers to get the most out of the high-TLP chips, we need big advances in development and debugging technology.

Not to mention the whole dynamic language VM issue I’ve been wondering about. Tim references Chris Rijk’s Thread Level Parallelism Design Decisions, which is now in my queue of “things I have to read”.