3 ms·

I was with you until the last sentence: "Processors would be able to evolve if they weren't hamstrung by having to support C." I don't think its fair or correc

I was with you until the last sentence: "Processors would be able to evolve if they weren't hamstrung by having to support C." I don't think its fair or correct to say that C is the real issue. Recently there have been languages like erlang and support for more functional models that make concurrent code a lot easier to write. The first real consumer multicore processors were only released a bit over 10 years with Intel's Core 2 duo's. Of course SMP systems existed before that, Sun had them for years, but they were relatively niche. Still, Java, C++, C#, are all languages that produce much easier to maintain code if they are single threaded. Recent darlings like JS and Python are single threaded out of the box. The large majority of languages in use today are not designed to be concurrent as a first principle. True multicore systems have been around for decades, software and mindshare is now starting to catch up and use tools that make concurrency easy.

jacquesm 8y ago
> Recently there have been languages like erlang Erlang is decades old. It's 32, only 16 years younger than C.
SomeHacker44 8y ago
My Symbolics computers (running Symbolics Ivory processors) run Lisp really well, as well as C - they have a C compiler. I have operational computers of a variety of architectures at home, including the oldest generations (6502, 680x0), Sparc, Symbolics, DEC Alpha, MIPS 32- and 64-bit, etc., and even an extremely rare (and unfortunately not-running) Multiflow, the granddaddy of VLIW. My favorite part of the original article was the final section. I wish we had a modern CPU renassiance akin to what was going on in the 80s and 90s, but the market dominance of x64 and ARM seems to be squelching things, with optimizations to those architectures rather than novel new ones (with possibly novel new compiler technologies). 64-bit ARM was a nice little improvement, though.

jacquesm 8y ago

> Recently there have been languages like erlang Erlang is decades old. It's 32, only 16 years younger than C.

SomeHacker44 8y ago

My Symbolics computers (running Symbolics Ivory processors) run Lisp really well, as well as C - they have a C compiler. I have operational computers of a variety of architectures at home, including the oldest generations (6502, 680x0), Sparc, Symbolics, DEC Alpha, MIPS 32- and 64-bit, etc., and even an extremely rare (and unfortunately not-running) Multiflow, the granddaddy of VLIW. My favorite part of the original article was the final section. I wish we had a modern CPU renassiance akin to what was going on in the 80s and 90s, but the market dominance of x64 and ARM seems to be squelching things, with optimizations to those architectures rather than novel new ones (with possibly novel new compiler technologies). 64-bit ARM was a nice little improvement, though.