Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Microsoft Releases New Concurrent Programming Language

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the secret-agent-man dept.

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."

5 of 297 comments (clear)

  1. This will be fun... by Tenek · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.)

  2. Re:Focuses on Interfaces to Ease the Pain by ShadowRangerRIT · · Score: 4, Interesting

    One last thing I'd like to bitch about is that this download is an MSI. Really? You really need to do that? For the love of christ, I'm a developer. Could you please just give me a standalone zipped up SDK directory that I could add to my path if I want to? I'm not even going to install this because it's going to get all up in my registry n' shit.

    While I realize that bitching about MS products is a common hobby, you could just extract the files directly and avoid any installation.

    msiexec ships with Vista (and possibly earlier versions of Windows, I haven't checked). There are a number of third party programs that could do it as well, just look around.

    --
    $_ = "wftedskaebjgdpjgidbsmnjgcdwatb"; tr/a-z/oh, turtleneck Phrase Jar!/; print
  3. Re:So, where did they steal this idea from? by thrillseeker · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The "channel" technique makes me think of Occam.

  4. Re:Not "Insightful", "Clueless" by Burkin · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Come on, who ever complained about Microsoft "stealing" any of the existing languages supportted by .Net? That was not true for Eiffel or managed C++ or IronPython, or... you get the point.

    Actually there have been many criticisms of IronPython and Managed C++ in the usual "embrace, extend" whining on this site and on other tech sites.

    So using an existing concurrent language would make a lot of sense and annoy no-one.

    Bullshit. People would whine no matter what because it's Microsoft.

  5. Re:So, where did they steal this idea from? by kohaku · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I think most concurrent languages have been derived at least in part from CSP, so they'll probably all 'feel' like occam; it's just occam got there first. Incidentally, if you already knew about occam, you might want to check out David May's (the guy behind Occam) new startup XMOS.
    I'm not affiliated, but I do own their dev kit :-)