A shout out to the GPars framework [1] which makes actor based coding stunningly easy in Groovy / Java. I'm kind of shocked by the performance I can get out of

A shout out to the GPars framework [1] which makes actor based coding stunningly easy in Groovy / Java. I'm kind of shocked by the performance I can get out of it, to be honest. I once assumed that for trivial tasks (reading lines from a file, transforming them, writing out result etc), a parallel library would lose a lot of overhead in thread synchronisation. However I find that I can trivially construct data flows that massively outperform single threaded C code in Groovy. Which is to say, whatever overhead there is from thread synchronisation is dwarfed by the benefit of parallelising reading, computation and writing. If I had to think hard about concurrency to do it (as I would in C) I would probably never attempt it for simple programs, but GPars makes it so easy, safe and completely portable that there's really no reason not to. [1] http://www.gpars.org/ http://www.gpars.org/