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David RonMar 3rd 2010 12:53PM

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Nearly every programming language on earth has constructs for threading. The major drawback is that they generally communicate through shared memory which causes locking issues (one thread writing to an area in memory causes the other to wait to do a read), and worse, deadlock (one thread is writing to memoryA and is locked waiting to read memoryB and another thread is writing to memoryB and locked waiting to read memoryA).

The general solution to deadlock is message-passing, a problem solved well through new languages such as SCALA's "Actors" (Scala compiles to Java .class and .jar files for use with Java applications or standalone). I'm not sure how Google Go solves the shared-memory issue, but there isn't anything wrong with concurrent programming even in older languages like c/c++/Java/Python, all containing thread support and similar modern messaging libraries. For instance, recent releases of Java have contained upgraded threading support.

How else are you able to hear the gun shots over the sound of the music while you see movement on the screen while multi-player chat is going on while the mouse is able to move the character on the screen in your favorite game? That's right: multithreading!

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(Unverified)Mar 3rd 2010 7:27PM

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I think we're agreeing here, but I'm not sure...

The only example I can give, with my games background, is the PlayStation 2. It supported HUGE parallelism, but until much later in its development cycle no one really knew how to code it -- the tools weren't available. People had to hand-code parallel routines to make the prettiest and best games.

Parallel/threaded coding could be a lot easier than it is today with Java/C++/etc. Bring on the Go!

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(Unverified)Mar 5th 2010 5:22PM

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You are correct that massive parallelism is hard with simple threading models, but modern message passing is the best current solution. It's the solution Go implements, and it's exactly the same as as any other language with support for concurrent message passing, including Java/C++ with new library support.

People seem to forget that old languages can Evolve. Let's take Java as an example. In 2004, Java 5 came out with advanced threading support which has allowed Java to be one of the best languages to implement enterprise servers. Java has support for Messaging platforms such as JMS as third-party add-ons that allow for massively parallel software. Java 7 is coming out next year with support for closures that will enable an even more terse syntax for concurrent message passing, and Scala is out today for Java to allow the same. And, Java 7 will have additional support for concurrent programming:
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-jtp03048.html?ca

Other languages such as C# and C++ have evolved similarly. New (and old) dynamic functional languages such are F#, Scala, Clojure, Ruby, erlang, have had built in santax designed for no-shared-memory concurrency for quite a while.

Programming languages should be about syntax, but this over-hyped feature is not anything new, and has little directly to do with the language syntax.

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JordanMar 8th 2010 9:59AM

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I'll say straight up I'm not a programmer. I know basic C, but other than that nothing. As a user, I do know that Java needs to die a painful death.

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