http://www.parallelroads.com/blog thoughts on technology and design by Rick Molloy Sat, 08 Nov 2008 18:00:55 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en A very common use case for concurrency is computing a value asynchronously, this is often called a ‘future’ and frequently folks talk about promises of future values as well.  Section 35 of the C++0x draft has a proposal for a future construct, and the Parallel Extensions to .NET also has ... http://www.parallelroads.com/blog/2008/11/building-an-asynchronous-future-in-visua/ It's been a very long but great day today at PDC. I talked earlier in the day on the Parallel Pattern Library, Asynchronous Agents Library and Concurrency Runtime and demonstrating the CTP of Visual Studio 2010.   Hazim Shafi also spoke on multi-threaded and parallel performance.  I spent the latter portion ... http://www.parallelroads.com/blog/2008/10/notes-from-pdc-2008-day-1/ Several folks have blogged recently about the book beautiful code, some like Jeff have blogged multiple times about it.  The reactions are somewhat mixed and not really surprisingly.  I really would expect beauty, which is decidedly aesthetic to vary from person to person. I'll be honest and state that I ... http://www.parallelroads.com/blog/2008/06/beauty-is-in-the-eye-of-the-beholder/ I was reading Michael Feather's blog the other day and he mentioned how he thinks lambdas may create a tension between clutter & expressiveness.  In the spirit of consensus building, I'll tend to agree that like any tool they can be overused or misapplied.  But, there are many extremely useful ... http://www.parallelroads.com/blog/2008/05/keeping-things-clean-with-lambdas-the-stl/ OK, so I promised to add some more traces showing speedups of real user applications, i.e. not developer tools or benchmark suites.  The weekends over, but I thought that I would add an application that I’m confident a lot of people are using… Internet Explorer 7. How does IE ... http://www.parallelroads.com/blog/2008/04/is-4-cores-really-the-end-part-3/