I think Erlang-style concurrency is the answer to exponential growth of core count. You can kind of fake it with other main stream languages. But the solutions always leave me wanting. I am not willing to give up multi-paradigm programming (C++/D) to switch to Erlang's draconian syntax.
What is Erlang-style concurrency:
From one of the language authors(What is Erlang's concurrency model actually ?):
- Lightweight concurrency.
Cheap to create threads and cheap to maintain insane numbers. - Asynchronous communication.
Threads only communicate via messages. - Error handling.
- Process isolation.
Or from an informed blogger (What is Erlang-Style Concurrency?):
- Fast process creation/destruction
- Ability to support >> 10 000 concurrent processes with largely unchanged characteristics.
- Fast asynchronous message passing.
- Copying message-passing semantics (share-nothing concurrency).
- Process monitoring.
- Selective message reception.
I think D's message passing can accomplish most of these features. The ones I wonder about are ">>10,000 concurrent processes(threads)" and "fast process creation/destruction".
How well does D handle these requirements?
I think that to support them correctly you'd have to use green threads. Can D's message passing features be used with green threads library?