I think application development faces two challenges nowadays: 64-bit and multi-core\/many-core hardware. Switching from 32 to 64 bit is just another step in the evolution of processors. There was a time when we switched from 8 to 16, and then from 16 to 32. There are problems that arise every time, but probably in 10-20 years we will have 128 bit platforms. On the other hand, multi-core\/many-core is a different shift not only in development but also thinking. We either run one core or multiple core processors. My working stations has 8 cores (4 physical and 4 virtualized) and so does my laptop. Still, I don’t see an 8 times improvement of the applications running on these machines; yet I know 8 times I not what I should expect. But not even 4 times. For instance, the time for building from scratch the application I’ve working on with Visual Studio 2008 dropped from 20 minutes to 8 minutes; that’s a 2.5 improvement. I know that having N cores doesn’t mean that applications can run N times faster, because not everything can run in several threads, and then we have problems with resource access, synchronization and others. All these prevent applications run N times faster. But the problem is that we are not thinking in parallel. We are still used to program in a single thread; and when I say that I mean not only most developers are not used to do parallelization for boosting performance of some routines, but also many operations are run in the main (UI) thread, making that GUI freeze.<\/p>\n
Therefore I would like to get some feedback from people working in applications development to get an idea about awareness, issues, solutions regarding concurrency. Please take several minutes to answer the questions in this survey.<\/p>\n
I’d like to quote James Reinders, lead evangelist and Director of Marketing and Business Development for Intel Software Development Products, who said that:<\/p>\n
I am still confident that software development in 2016 will not be kind to programmers who have not learned to “Think Parallel.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
The “not parallel” era we are now exiting will appear to be a very primitive time in the history of computers when people look back in a hundred years. The world works in parallel, and it is time for computer programs to do the same.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Doing one thing at a time is “so yesterday.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
The questionnaire bellow is also available here<\/a>.<\/p>\n