Some recent developments among development environments for mobile phones have made me consider the hereto unthinkable: that C might be on a decline as the universal programming language. Indeed, maybe there is even a chance that we will not have a universal low-level language in the future at all. What is happening is that the hitherto “given” role of C as the base language for a platform is being questioned. The reason appears to be security, which cannot be said to be a bad thing. However, a large-scale move away from C might hurt many of today’s higher-level languages and even model-based engineering.
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Tag Archives: Erlang
C in Danger – and thus Higher-Level Languages (?)
SiCS Multicore Day 2009
Last Friday, I attended this year’s edition of the SiCS Multicore Day. It was smaller in scale than last year, being only a single day rather than two days. The program was very high quality nevertheless, with keynote talks from Hazim Shafi of Microsoft, Richard Kaufmann of HP, and Anders Landin of Sun. Additionally, there was a mid-day three-track session with research and industry talks from the Swedish multicore community. Read More →
StackOverflow interviews CouchDB
Last year, FLOSS Weekly interviewed Jan Lehnard of the CouchDB project. I put up a blog post on this, noting that it was interesting with a scalable parallel program written in Erlang, a true concurrent language. The interview was interesting, but not very deeply technical. Now, almost a year later, the StackOverflow podcast, number 59, interviewed the founder of the project, Damien Katz. This interview goes a bit more into the technical details and what CouchDB is good for and what not, as well as some details on the use and performance of Erlang.
Threading or Not as a Hardware Modeling Paradigm
Traditional hardware design languages like Verilog were designed to model naturally concurrent behavior, and they naturally leaned on a concept of threads to express this. This idea of independent threads was brought over into the design of SystemC, where it was manifested as cooperative multitasking using a user-level threading package. While threads might at first glance look “natural” as a modeling paradigm for hardware simulations, it is really not a good choice for high-performance simulation.
In practice, threading as a paradigm for software models of hardware circuits connected to a programmable processor brings more problems than it provides benefits in terms of “natural” modeling.
SICS Multicore Day 2007 – More on Programming
Some more thoughts on how to program multicore machines that did not make it into my original posting from last week. Some of this was discussed at the multicore day, and others I have been thinking about for some time now.
One of the best ways to handle any hard problem is to make it “somebody else’s problem“. In computer science this is also known as abstraction, and it is a very useful principle for designing more productive programming languages and environments. Basically, the idea I am after is to let a programmer focus on the problem at hand, leaving somebody else to fill in the details and map the problem solution onto the execution substrate.