Personally I'd probably label MPI as "too low-level" an abstraction, not unlike threads; and I think there are many great high-level threading abstractions whic

Personally I'd probably label MPI as "too low-level" an abstraction, not unlike threads; and I think there are many great high-level threading abstractions which I wouldn't call fragile, from Cilk/TBB and the like to transactional memory. What I meant to say was, Cilk/similar can be very useful at times, transactional memory at other times, Erlang-style fully isolated lightweight processes at still other times, etc. - and none of these approaches comes with a universally available interface, also none is universally taught (while threads are.) So my guess is that raw threads will be used increasingly less but (A) it will take time and (B) either we miss something right now or it will take more mechanisms and approaches to replace raw threads than it took to replace goto. That said, anyone needing to do something with threads today at any sort of scale (even if it's one guy who writes something that needs to be maintained over a long span of time) should IMO hide the threads behind something. (My take on it is https://github.com/yosefk/checkedthreads https://github.com/yosefk/checkedthreads)