by Jonathan Erickson, Dr. Dobb’s
Niklas Gustafsson, a software architect and member of Microsoft’s Parallel Computing Platform team addresses some of the complexities of writing parallel applications and Maestro, a special purpose language for parallel computing.
To answer what is Maestro, he said, “First of all, Maestro is an incubation project within Microsoft’s Developer Division. That means that we’re somewhere between research and product development, trying to take some advanced ideas and put them to practical use, but not quite sure what the timeframe for release will be.
Maestro is what I call a “special-purpose language” (SPL) meant to address some of the complexities of authoring parallel applications. By “special-purpose” I mean that I fully expect that Maestro would not be the only language you use to write an application, it is designed to be used with an object-oriented language like C# or VB. Unlike some domain-specific languages, Maestro has enough general-purpose features so that you don’t have to jump out into C# or VB just because you want to add two numbers or scan through a list, but its focus is on orchestrating concurrent component interactions, not implementing algorithms or authoring type libraries. ”
