[seanmcdirmid]

My main issue here is that people here "parallelism" and "a lot faster" they automatically think "scaling." But just hardware threading doesn't get us anywhere near that goal, even if we write our C-style multi-threaded code by hand very carefully.

The PL community is still not having honest up-to-date conversations about parallelism; they are about 20 years behind other fields.

[willvarfar]

Ok, you have to describe what you think the honest and up-to-date conversation about parallelism is then.

[seanmcdirmid]

Well, look at how people like Google's Jeff Dean, originally a PL person, became a systems person to basically attack parallelism problems head on. That is, look at the problems that NEED parallel computing, don't think of parallelism as a transparent benefit that is nice to have if it happens, and if it doesn't, its not the end of the world.

Once you accept that parallelism is needed, you realize that it is much more complex than just dividing things up onto multiple cores. That locking is never really the big problem, which really is one of concurrency, the problem becomes all about pumping data to the right place at the right time.