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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."
Now you know.
in your channel class then you can communicate with agent instances that implement that channel quite easily like:
If the data can't be sent over a channel you use (and this word should sound familiar to you web guys) a schema.
From there on out it gets a lot more complicated with state and domain communications/sharing. It looks better thought out than most of Microsoft's libraries I've been forced to use but--as always--new languages need many releases before they are production worthy. A noble effort to simplify concurrency. With some really slick operator coding and overloading, you could probably get a similar thing going in Java or C++.
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.
My work here is dung.
The windows version works great, but Axum on Linux isn't ready for prime time, yet. However, Axum is powerful enough that you should probably change your platform to permit its use, so if you have a new app being developed, I'd force your engineers to use Axum and develop it on windows.
And I know what I'm talking about because I'm an IT manager at a Fortune 500 company.
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.)
The "channel" technique makes me think of Occam.
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.
Because you would whine and bitch about them "stealing" the language if they were to co-opt another concurrent programming language to run in their .NET environment.
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.
Now it is true that C# was taken lock, stock and barrel from Java when the Microsoft embrace and extend strategy was slapped down there (read the memos), but no-one ever complained about other languages being added in just as no-one accuses Java of "stealing" all the languages that VM supports now. So using an existing concurrent language would make a lot of sense and annoy no-one.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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