I think we are now in the position of defining a solid set of concurrency primitives for D. This follows many months of mulling over models and options.

It would be great to open the participation to the design as broadly as possible, but I think it's realistic to say we won't be able to get things done on the newsgroup. When we discuss a topic around here, there's plenty of good ideas but also the inevitable bikeshed discussions, explanations being asked, explanations being given, and other sources of noise. We simply don't have the time to deal with all that - the time is short and we only have one shot at this.

That's why I'm thinking of creating a mailing list or maybe another group for this. Any ideas on what would be the best approach? I also want to gauge interest from threading experts who'd like to participate. Please advise: (a) whether you would like to participate to the design; (b) keep discussions on the general group; (c) create a separate newsgroup; (d) create a mailing list. The latter would have open enrollment.


Andrei

I'd like to participate. Both email and newsgroup are fine. Even IRC or other Internet chatroom would be ok too. Past concurrency/shared discussions on this newsgroup have not suffered from bikeshed issues. I think it's all been too theoretical or outside moat programmers' experience. There's almost no keywords to debate anyway.

Andrei Alexandrescu Wrote:

> I think we are now in the position of defining a solid set of concurrency primitives for D. This follows many months of mulling over models and options.
> 
> It would be great to open the participation to the design as broadly as possible, but I think it's realistic to say we won't be able to get things done on the newsgroup. When we discuss a topic around here, there's plenty of good ideas but also the inevitable bikeshed discussions, explanations being asked, explanations being given, and other sources of noise. We simply don't have the time to deal with all that - the time is short and we only have one shot at this.
> 
> That's why I'm thinking of creating a mailing list or maybe another group for this. Any ideas on what would be the best approach? I also want to gauge interest from threading experts who'd like to participate. Please advise: (a) whether you would like to participate to the design; (b) keep discussions on the general group; (c) create a separate newsgroup; (d) create a mailing list. The latter would have open enrollment.
> 
> 
> Andrei

Sun, 27 Dec 2009 14:32:52 -0600, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:

> I think we are now in the position of defining a solid set of concurrency primitives for D. This follows many months of mulling over models and options.
> 
> It would be great to open the participation to the design as broadly as possible, but I think it's realistic to say we won't be able to get things done on the newsgroup. When we discuss a topic around here, there's plenty of good ideas but also the inevitable bikeshed discussions, explanations being asked, explanations being given, and other sources of noise. We simply don't have the time to deal with all that - the time is short and we only have one shot at this.
> 
> That's why I'm thinking of creating a mailing list or maybe another group for this. Any ideas on what would be the best approach? I also want to gauge interest from threading experts who'd like to participate. Please advise: (a) whether you would like to participate to the design; (b) keep discussions on the general group; (c) create a separate newsgroup; (d) create a mailing list. The latter would have open enrollment.

Have the discussions here ever led to a conclusion and get implemented? You should at least disallow posting via the web interface - those broken threads start to annoy some people.

While you're at it, I, for one, welcome a new concurrency architecture that scales nicely when I want optimal array processing on i486, PII/SSE, P4/HT, Core i7/HT/SSE 4.2, and perhaps also on Beowulf (takes care of network latencies). Would it use the new immutable actor/message model you're building?

retard Wrote:

> Sun, 27 Dec 2009 14:32:52 -0600, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> 
> > I think we are now in the position of defining a solid set of concurrency primitives for D. This follows many months of mulling over models and options.
> > 
> > It would be great to open the participation to the design as broadly as possible, but I think it's realistic to say we won't be able to get things done on the newsgroup. When we discuss a topic around here, there's plenty of good ideas but also the inevitable bikeshed discussions, explanations being asked, explanations being given, and other sources of noise. We simply don't have the time to deal with all that - the time is short and we only have one shot at this.
> > 
> > That's why I'm thinking of creating a mailing list or maybe another group for this. Any ideas on what would be the best approach? I also want to gauge interest from threading experts who'd like to participate. Please advise: (a) whether you would like to participate to the design; (b) keep discussions on the general group; (c) create a separate newsgroup; (d) create a mailing list. The latter would have open enrollment.
> 
> Have the discussions here ever led to a conclusion and get implemented?

DIP2 is a great example of something designed on this newsgroup that got implemented very recently. It went from newsgroup to bugzilla to DIP to implementation. T[new] is another one that almost made it.


> You should at least disallow posting via the web interface - those broken threads start to annoy some people.

Do my posts show up as broken threads? I use the web interface almost exclusively.

Sun, 27 Dec 2009 18:56:09 -0500, Jason House wrote:

> retard Wrote:
> 
>> Sun, 27 Dec 2009 14:32:52 -0600, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>> 
>> > I think we are now in the position of defining a solid set of concurrency primitives for D. This follows many months of mulling over models and options.
>> > 
>> > It would be great to open the participation to the design as broadly as possible, but I think it's realistic to say we won't be able to get things done on the newsgroup. When we discuss a topic around here, there's plenty of good ideas but also the inevitable bikeshed discussions, explanations being asked, explanations being given, and other sources of noise. We simply don't have the time to deal with all that - the time is short and we only have one shot at this.
>> > 
>> > That's why I'm thinking of creating a mailing list or maybe another group for this. Any ideas on what would be the best approach? I also want to gauge interest from threading experts who'd like to participate. Please advise: (a) whether you would like to participate to the design; (b) keep discussions on the general group; (c) create a separate newsgroup; (d) create a mailing list. The latter would have open enrollment.
>> 
>> Have the discussions here ever led to a conclusion and get implemented?
> 
> DIP2 is a great example of something designed on this newsgroup that got implemented very recently. It went from newsgroup to bugzilla to DIP to implementation. T[new] is another one that almost made it.

Ok, good to know.

>> You should at least disallow posting via the web interface - those broken threads start to annoy some people.
> 
> Do my posts show up as broken threads? I use the web interface almost exclusively.

This one didn't break the thread. But sometimes it does break.

On 27/12/09 23:56, Jason House wrote:
>> You should at least disallow posting via the web interface - those broken
>> threads start to annoy some people.
>
> Do my posts show up as broken threads? I use the web interface almost exclusively.

Which web interface do you use? there are 2 of them, maybe one of them doesn't break it?

On 27/12/09 20:32, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> I think we are now in the position of defining a solid set of
> concurrency primitives for D. This follows many months of mulling over
> models and options.

Excellent! The last time I had a real play with D2 this is what I found was missing, particularly when a lot of the newer features are built with concurrency in mind.

> It would be great to open the participation to the design as broadly as
> possible, but I think it's realistic to say we won't be able to get
> things done on the newsgroup. When we discuss a topic around here,
> there's plenty of good ideas but also the inevitable bikeshed
> discussions, explanations being asked, explanations being given, and
> other sources of noise. We simply don't have the time to deal with all
> that - the time is short and we only have one shot at this.

You're most probably right about this. It would be nice for it to be as open as possible, you don't want it ending up with bikesheds all over the place though, particularly at this early stage. Maybe a sort of guided openness could be used? If you go with another newsgroup it won't matter about the noise, and you could go through the design process in a nice guided manner, getting people's initial ideas, voting on them, discussing pro's/cons etc, that way you get something reasonably workable before you get to the bikesheds. If you let everyone dive in straight off I don't think much will come out of it

> That's why I'm thinking of creating a mailing list or maybe another
> group for this. Any ideas on what would be the best approach? I also
> want to gauge interest from threading experts who'd like to participate.
> Please advise: (a) whether you would like to participate to the design;
> (b) keep discussions on the general group; (c) create a separate
> newsgroup; (d) create a mailing list. The latter would have open
> enrollment.

(a) I doubt I'd be much use here, I might have a comment here and there to throw in though

(b..$) b or c are the preferable options for me, they're easier for me to follow and require little or no setup... excuse my laziness!

Robert Clipsham Wrote:

> On 27/12/09 23:56, Jason House wrote:
> >> You should at least disallow posting via the web interface - those broken threads start to annoy some people.
> >
> > Do my posts show up as broken threads? I use the web interface almost exclusively.
> 
> Which web interface do you use? there are 2 of them, maybe one of them doesn't break it?

Here is the URL I used to view your message: http://www.digitalmars.com/webnews/newsgroups.php?art_group=digitalmars.D&article_id=104129

Andrei Alexandrescu Wrote:

> I think we are now in the position of defining a solid set of concurrency primitives for D. This follows many months of mulling over models and options.
> 
> It would be great to open the participation to the design as broadly as possible, but I think it's realistic to say we won't be able to get things done on the newsgroup. When we discuss a topic around here, there's plenty of good ideas but also the inevitable bikeshed discussions, explanations being asked, explanations being given, and other sources of noise. We simply don't have the time to deal with all that - the time is short and we only have one shot at this.
> 
> That's why I'm thinking of creating a mailing list or maybe another group for this. Any ideas on what would be the best approach? I also want to gauge interest from threading experts who'd like to participate. Please advise: (a) whether you would like to participate to the design; (b) keep discussions on the general group; (c) create a separate newsgroup; (d) create a mailing list. The latter would have open enrollment.
> 
> 
> Andrei

I'd love to follow the discussion.  I'm not sure whether I have all that much expertise for contributing to the "core debate".  It seems like you and Walter have had a pattern where you discuss things among yourself and post the occasional "here's our thinking" to a group like this for the rest of us; I'd like to at least hear about the cool stuff periodically, even if the discussion here is just chewing the scraps from the real table.

That said, I'll throw out one high level thought on the topic:

As for concurrency itself, my gut reaction is that I'd hope there would be
mutex + thread.  Obviously you want something better, and I look forward
to hearing all the cool stuff about it; but as clunky as we all know mutex +
thread are, it would be good to have them in some form.

One of the downsides of inventing / using a "new thing" is that when all the
existing systems use a particular programming paradigm it becomes hard
to integrate with them if you can't at least emulate that paradigm in a more
or less straightforward way.  If someone is wrapping OpenGL in their D code,
using a C library (just to pick an example, I don't know much OpenGL), it will
be very hard for them to bend OpenGL into an immutable / message passing
approach if it was designed for the land of thread + mutex.

I think that one of the big lessons of what might later be called the "silver bullet phase" of CompSci, is that there should be a marketplace where the various paradigms must compete.  If you build a new paradigm for this it is best if it is a top predator in an ecosystem of ideas, not a new planet with only a single monoculture.

All paradigms have a place; if a paradigm is used, there is probably a niche for that approach.  If it exists, it must have value.  Except for bubble-sort.

Kevin

On 2009-12-27 15:32:52 -0500, Andrei Alexandrescu <SeeWebsiteForEmail@erdani.org> said:

> I think we are now in the position of defining a solid set of concurrency primitives for D. This follows many months of mulling over models and options.
> 
> It would be great to open the participation to the design as broadly as possible, but I think it's realistic to say we won't be able to get things done on the newsgroup. When we discuss a topic around here, there's plenty of good ideas but also the inevitable bikeshed discussions, explanations being asked, explanations being given, and other sources of noise. We simply don't have the time to deal with all that - the time is short and we only have one shot at this.
> 
> That's why I'm thinking of creating a mailing list or maybe another group for this. Any ideas on what would be the best approach? I also want to gauge interest from threading experts who'd like to participate. Please advise: (a) whether you would like to participate to the design; (b) keep discussions on the general group; (c) create a separate newsgroup; (d) create a mailing list. The latter would have open enrollment.

I think it should be as open as possible. If done in a separate smaller group, it may be a good idea to post reports to the general newsgroup more or less regularly so that those who cannot participate in the detailed discussions have an idea of where it's going, and also to get more general input.

About the bikeshed issue, I'm not sure how much those bikeshed discussions are slowing down the more important ones, but they often start from legitimate real, often syntactic, issues. Those discussions shouldn't be avoided just because everyone has an opinion. But perhaps regular reports to the general newsgroup would help confining them there.

I'd be in favor of creating a newsgroup for concurrency, and I'll probably want to participate a little too, although I'm not sure how much yet.

-- 
Michel Fortin
michel.fortin@michelf.com
http://michelf.com/