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Alternatives to C/C++ for system programming in a distributed multicore world
S. Tucker Taft, Adacore
FEBRUARY 23, 2014
The distributed, multicore train is stopping for no programmer, and especially the systems programmer will need to be ready to hop on to the distributed parallel programming paradigm to keep their systems running as efficiently as possible on the latest hardware environments.
There are three new systems programming languages that have appeared in the last few years which are attempting to provide a safe, productive, and efficient parallel programming capability. Go is a new language from Google [1], Rust is a new language from Mozilla [2], and ParaSail is a new language from AdaCore [3][4].
The designers of Go, Rust, and ParaSail all are facing a common challenge -- how to help programmers address the new distributed and multicore architectures, without having the complexity of programming going past that which is manageable by the professional, yet still human, programmer. All programming languages evolve, and as a rule, they tend to get more complex, not less so.
There are three new systems programming languages that have appeared in the last few years which are attempting to provide a safe, productive, and efficient parallel programming capability. Go is a new language from Google [1], Rust is a new language from Mozilla [2], and ParaSail is a new language from AdaCore [3][4].
The designers of Go, Rust, and ParaSail all are facing a common challenge -- how to help programmers address the new distributed and multicore architectures, without having the complexity of programming going past that which is manageable by the professional, yet still human, programmer. All programming languages evolve, and as a rule, they tend to get more complex, not less so.
If every time a new hardware architecture becomes important, the programming language is enhanced to provide better support for that architecture, the language can become totally unwieldy, even for the best programmers.
When the architectures changes radically, as with the new massively distributed and/or multicore/manycore architectures, this may mean that the language no longer hangs together at all, and instead has become a federation of sublanguages, much like a house that has been added onto repeatedly with a different style for each addition.
Because of the complexity curse associated with language evolution, when there is a significant shift in the hardware landscape, there is a strong temptation to start over in programming language design. After many years of a relatively stable programming language world, we now see a new burst of activity on the language design front, inspired in large part by the sense that our existing mainstream languages are either not going to be supportive enough, or that they are becoming simply too complex in trying to support both the old and new hardware paradigms through a series of language extensions.
When the architectures changes radically, as with the new massively distributed and/or multicore/manycore architectures, this may mean that the language no longer hangs together at all, and instead has become a federation of sublanguages, much like a house that has been added onto repeatedly with a different style for each addition.
Because of the complexity curse associated with language evolution, when there is a significant shift in the hardware landscape, there is a strong temptation to start over in programming language design. After many years of a relatively stable programming language world, we now see a new burst of activity on the language design front, inspired in large part by the sense that our existing mainstream languages are either not going to be supportive enough, or that they are becoming simply too complex in trying to support both the old and new hardware paradigms through a series of language extensions.
.Rust from Mozilla ResearchThe modern web browser represents one of the most complex and critical pieces of software of the internet era. The browser is also a place where performance is critical, and there are many opportunities for using parallelism as a web page is “rendered.” The Rust language arose originally as a personal project by one of the engineers at Mozilla Research (Graydon Hoare), and has grown now into a Mozilla-sponsored research effort. Rust has been designed to help address the complexity of building components of a modern browser-centric software infrastructure, in the context of the new distributed multicore hardware environment. Like Go, Rust has chosen to simplify storage management by building garbage collection into the language. Unlike Go, Rust has chosen to restrict garbage collection to per-task heaps, and adopt a unique ownership policy for data that can be exchanged between tasks. What this means is that data that can be shared between tasks is visible to only one of them at a time, and only through a single pointer at a time (hence an owning pointer). This eliminates the possibility of data races between tasks, and eliminates the need for a garbage collector for this global data exchange heap. When an owning pointer is discarded, the storage designated by the pointer may be immediately reclaimed – so no garbage accumulates in the global exchange heap.
Source: http://www.embedded.com/design/programming-languages-and-tools/4428704/Alternatives-to-C-C--for-system-programming-in-a-distributed-multicore-world (Access November, 2016)
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