I apologize for lack of updates recently as an addition to the family has kept me hopping.
I have still been keeping up my parallel programming work by a recent talk on C++0x Multithreading at BoostCon 09.
My two talks seem packed with about 60 people in an auditorium for about 90 minutes.
Justin gave an excellent talk on a proposed Boost Transactional Memory Library which he is collaborating with the Father of TM: Maurice Herlihy.
I have been involved in Transactional Memory for a few years now and knows its hype, promise and pitfalls. Still I felt I was stirred by Justin's excellent oratory skills, pitching this technology. The idea of doing TM as a pure library is not easy, although it does get the technology into the hands of everyone as fast as possible. Language changes take time to get right. I should know and will discuss in a future post.
Please read their excellent trip reports for the details. I will turn my discussion on something else that is also interesting to me personally, but may not have much to do with Parallel programming.
BoostCon 09, as with previous BoostCon was an exciting experience. Without intentionally touting my own horn, BoostCon09 is rich with speakers of experience in the field. They choose their speaker carefully from the pantheon of C++. Last year was Bjarne Stroustrup. This year was Andrei Alexandrescu, whose topic is Iterators Must Go.
Andrei gave many reasons why iterators, once a good idea, are unsuitable as we move forward. For me, the most interesting argument is that iterators are not well suited to multithreaded programming, because many of the idea of stack pop and push can only work in single thread unless we change the interface.
BoostCon, in my opinion is rapidly becoming the leading C++ conference, in direct competition with SD West, and ACCU. All are packed with workshops, and knowledgeable speakers.
This year, there was a distinct track of parallel programming theme, which included:
- Joel Falcou: High-Level Parallel Programming EDSL - A BOOST libraries use case
- Stephan T. Lavavej: Parallel Patterns Library in Visual Studio 2010
- Justin Gottschlich, Jeremy Siek: Boost + Software Transactional Memory
- Troy Straszheim: Kamasu: Parallel computing on the GPU with boost::proto
and of course, yours truly's:
- Michael Wong: Multithreaded C++0x: The Dawn of a New Standard
All this makes me want to suggest a special track for parallel programming for Boost in future years.
I attended some of the 0x tutorials and found that I still had things that I didn't know. This is not surprising given the depth of C++0x.