David Stuart, the CEO of Critical Blue, writes an article on EETimes Asia saying that his customers are deploying multi-threaded software onto multi-core platforms. They’re not using new languages or tools, just applying their brains to the problem, and launching products to market at an amazing rate.
Don’t get me wrong. Academic research is vital, and when next-generation solutions are presented to the waiting world, someone will likely uncover a law of parallel programming as ubiquitous as that of Moore and Amdahl.
In the meantime, let’s not forget today’s developers who are working to meet performance and power-consumption targets by programming multi-core platforms. They are teaching themselves to use today’s languages and methodologies to achieve their goals, and it’s not easy. They’re making mistakes, learning, making more mistakes and learning more; in the end they’re getting their jobs done. Shouldn’t tool vendors be doing more to help them? Shouldn’t our industry be doing more to share the knowledge and experience that exists for the benefit of all developers? After all, isn’t that how academic research works?
