Thursday 21 May 2009

Anders Hejlsberg: We have huge amounts of memory and concurrent programming is an exception

See the video here:

http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/Going+Deep/Expert-to-Expert-Anders-Hejlsberg-The-Future-of-C/

It's quite amazing to hear Anders advocating bloat in a world where most of the world still has bad internet connections and hate large downloads, mobile phones prefer 1MB applications over 10MB apps, where RAM can be a bottleneck, where battery life is always too short and where many large organizations struggle with bad performance.

I recently had the chance to see the standard configuration for virtual servers in a large organization. In order to improve network traffic, the standard network adapter is limited to 10Mbit/sec.

Size matters.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I think you may have taken Anders comments about available resources a bit out of context. He was not promoting bloat, but rather saying that it is just a fact of life in todays programming world (even if we don't add to it ourselves, others will), and noting how this makes the process of introducing a new language more difficult than it used to be.

Lars D said...

Windows 7 will be released in a 32-bit version because there is a demand for it. It will be limited to 2-4 GB RAM, and this is our reality for a few years to come.

At the same time, the actual data amounts are increasing. Most Java and .net programmers that I know, run into memory problems - but using large RAM amounts is also slow, because you need to spend a lot of time reading or writing this data. There is a reason why ansistring is almost 2 times faster for certain operations compared to unicodestring - it uses half the amount of RAM.

Eric said...

I much agree with Lars.

Recently I've been facing more machines with *less* memory than a few years ago, mostly thanks to the explosion of virtual machines and sub-notebooks.
Also people nowadays expect the software to deal with large high-quality images, large amounts of data, videos, scriptable-stuff everywhere, etc.
If anything the memory pressure can now be felt, while a few years ago, RAM was indeed plentiful, and we were running out of ideas on how to waste it -- except for video RAM, as far as I can remember, there never was enough of it :)