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Microsoft Releases New Concurrent Programming Language
zokier writes "Microsoft has released a new programming language called Axum, previously known as Maestro and based on the actor model. It's meant to ease development of concurrent applications and thus making better use of multi-core processors. Axum does not have capabilities to define classes, but as it runs on the .NET platform, Axum can use classes made with C#. Microsoft has not committed to shipping Axum since it is still in an incubation phase of development so feedback from developers is certainly welcome."
Because the PHBs like a single vendor. Nothing confuses them more than saying, "We're getting the OS from Microsoft, the database from Oracle, the language from Sun and the hardware from Dell." The less companies in this list, the better, regardless of the merits of technology.
Synergy. "With our development suite you have tools that specialise in X Y Z allowing you to do A B C. Give us your money."
I thought the general consensus on this site especially with regards to open source software was that choice is a good thing? I'm sure if they used an existing language Microsoft would employ an embrace and extend strategy that would have developers/purists up in arms.
Man blir trött av att gå och göra ingenting.
Oh, you mean like C, C++, and BASIC? The reality is the most popular languages for MS platforms were not MS inventions.
Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws-Plato
The Actors Model is around 40 years old. Scheme was based upon it. Lisp have already shown in the eighties to be good at concurrent programming. Just NIH syndrome.
Well, it does use the same concurrency model as Erlang, but Erlang has no concept of classes. Perhaps Scala, which I know little about except that it runs on the JVM and is supposedly better at concurrency.
-mkb
> I haven't seen may apps that properly use OO
True, but it's very nice for program libraries - boost, wxWidgets, Qt, etc (yes I'm a C++ programmer) - where people who know what they're doing have already done the difficult stuff for the rest of us.
Adventure, Romance, MAD SCIENCE!
I don't know about "devlopers", but real developers use whatever OS they need to get the job done.
Wanted:
Senior Software Engineer
Windows Platforms
MFC C++ - 10 Years
C# - 5 years
Axum - 5 years
You *know* it's going to happen.
I see Microsoft is doing its best to help developers all over the world create race conditions. I wonder how many programmers there are who never really 'got' concurrency. Hopefully I'm not one of them. (And no, there is no programming language that can prevent you from screwing it up.)
Concurrent programming is becoming increasingly important for any kind of high-performance project. This doesn't necessarily mean one needs a "concurrent programming language" to do it - but whatever the chosen mechanism, the goal is the same - write a program that uses all cores effectively. One way or another, professional programmers are going to need to 'get' concurrency in the coming years.
The benefit of a language that provides parallelization as a basic assumption is that the language itself can provide infrastructure (for message-passing, task-scheduling, and so on) useful to the task. Such a language encourages programmers to think about problems in terms of how they can be parallelized, but leaves the compiler or the runtime engine free to make decisions about how the parallelization is to occur.
Another benefit of such a language is that a language that takes certain ideas as base assumptions can help guide the programmer's approach to a solution. This can involve a significant learning curve for the programmer (see, for instance, Prolog or various functional languages...) but it can help programmers to achieve a new way of solving their problems: in this case, one that is rather well suited to the current needs of high-performance CPUs.
The challenge with synchronization in Axum, presumably, is that it's possible to write code that will run in the engine that won't conform to the rules for an "actor" - that it will perform some non-thread-safe access to a file, or that it will otherwise do something that won't be safe when run in parallel. From that perspective it's no different from (almost) any other language - as you say, it's still possible to screw up. What it does provide, however, are guidelines and framework to help keep you from screwing up.
Bow-ties are cool.
The thread control facilities available in the C# language are already quite extensive and include pretty much every known way to control concurrency presently used in software: mutexes, semaphores, locks, etc...they are all there. For example, the following paper (PDF link), written by Andrew Birrell of Microsoft Research, covers all the basics and explains the various options in C#. If they wanted more robust threading frameworks then why not simply add the relevant classes to the .NET Framework class library (i.e. in System.Threading)?
You're making the mistake that concurrency is the same thing as parallelism. It is not. Concurrency is when a program is written in such a way that the order of execution of tasks is highly underspecified; parallelism is the use of multiple execution units to execute concurrent code.
Concurrency isn't just for performance; concurrency is just as much for writing software that can do many things at once. For example, one needs concurrency to have client applications that respond to the user with very low latency while doing some other work in the background. In this case, in fact, the software isn't trying to perform its heavy computations in the absolute minimum time; it's OK to slow down the heavy computation somewhat in order to reduce user interface latency. Have you ever used one of those applications where the whole UI hangs (e.g., won't even draw) while the application does some action, like connecting to a server? That's a failure to provide concurrency.
Contrary to common wisom, the introduction of multicore processors didn't increase our need for good tools for concurrent programming, because we've needed such tools since way before for user interaction. The tools that conventional languages provide for threading and synchronization are too hard to use, leading programmers to introduce far less concurrency into the software than they otherwise could. Also, conventional threads are much too heavyweight for an application to create thousands of them.
Are you adequate?
Next question asked is WHY has Microsoft have to invent one when there are others available already?
I'd suggest several major reasons: .NET Environment.
.NET, does give it a unique feature that distinguishes it from other concurrent languages (even if you loathe .NET, it still separates it from the rest).
1. Integration with the
2. Integration with the Visual Studio IDE.
3. Maximise control of the style of the language, featureset and its future direction.
If you check the wikipedia page the parent linked to, there are already stacks of concurrent programming languages available, it's not like there's some universal standard concurrency language out there Microsoft is trying to displace. That, and the above points, particularly with respect to
Probably the answer is "Because they can" and they see a business in locking in people into their environment.
Yes and no. You can take the whole lock-in argument (not entirely unreasonably), but you can also take the argument that for those who don't actually have a need to develop something for multiple platforms, a language fundamentally focused on a Windows-centric design with related tools is probably a huge positive. Why code in a language with a crap toolset/IDE (assuming there is one) and various other potential problems when MS offers one that plugs into .NET, VS, and is guaranteed to work great on Windows out of the box? That, and if you're already familiar with the above, the migration path I suspect is quite easy.
.NET based, Mono may or may not support some of this stuff. No idea.
Of course, this being