Future of computing: get ready
Herb Sutter has a great, albeit lengthy article about future of computing . Five years from now we want to be delivering apps that run well on an isolated device, and then just run faster or better when they are in WiFi range and have dynamic access to many more cores. The makers of our operating systems, runtimes, libraries, programming languages, and tools need to get us to a place where we can create compute-bound applications that run well in isolation on disconnected devices with 1,000-way local parallelism… and when the device is in WiFi range just run faster, handle much larger data sets, and/or light up with additional capabilities. I cannot but agree with him. We already feel the need to think in multi-threaded way even when we design trivial things. And we already cloud-bound - think iCloud, Gmail or any other of dozens of cloud services out there that we use daily. So maybe it is a time to brush up the multi-threading skills and/or get hands-on experience ...