Andrew Binstock: Threadbare!
November 1, 2007 —
(Page 1 of 2)
The vendors most concerned with promoting threading on the desktop—that is, chip vendors whose future is closely tied to capitalizing on multiple cores—are slowly but inevitably coming to a disappointing conclusion: Desktop developers are not interested in threading. And no amount of flag waving or promotion is going to persuade them to adopt threads.
Intel has certainly been trying. It recently made its Threading Building Blocks available for free and got O’Reilly and Associates to release an entire volume documenting the software’s use. Intel also offers several very good threading tools. And, along with several vendors, the company has pushed the development and distribution of OpenMP, which is probably the simplest way today to implement threading. The results of all this effort have been undetectable, so far. Gamers, multimedia apps and software from ISVs are still the primary, perhaps exclusive, users of threads on the desktop. No one else cares.
Why the resistance? Several reasons. First, a strong case for threading has not been made. Everyone understands how it runs software faster. But if users aren’t pushing for greater performance than they’re currently getting from desktop apps, the effort to add threading lacks a compelling driver. Second, threading is hard. It requires a different mindset from the straight-ahead programming most developers know, and it demands new skills, such as special design and debugging prowess. Third, the frameworks and languages lack robust support. Threads are supported in Java and .NET, but primarily as primitive resources. High-level support is notably weak.
Dynamic languages are even further behind. To wit, Python, allows only one thread to run at a time (except for I/O); this means you can have threads but not running in parallel. Ruby can run threads only within the one VM, which is arguably better but nowhere near good enough. And OpenMP, which might be a solution for some, is limited to C++ or Fortran.
Fourth, development tools lag in thread support. The major IDEs provide basic support, but for anything more, you have to go to third-party products. Alas, there are few of these; the most notable is a trio of products from Intel. While there are one-off offerings elsewhere, there is little tool help overall for the programmer who wants to go parallel.
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