Lambda the Ultimate

Herb Sutter has this fascinating article discussing the notion that programmers haven't really had to worry much about performance or concurrency because of Moore's Law. However the CPU makers are running out of ways to make CPUs faster, in terms of raw Mmhz, and instead will be reduced to opting for multi-cpu and multi-core approaches.

As a consequence he believes that concurrency will become a first class concern for more developers (including language designers) and language there will be a resurgence in interest in what he calls 'efficient languages'.

I'm currently doing a lot more work with highly concurrent GUI applications in Java and discovering that there's a shortage of sensible guidelines out there on designing applications in the face of pervasive multi-threading or even ways of re-organising standard design patterns like MVC to handle inter-thread communications.

Since the only mainstream language I know of with good concurrency features built in is Java 5 I'm left wondering how people handle these issues in other languages.

Does anyone know of any research about designing for concurrency in rich client applications? Ideally in a style that minimises the amount of locking involved?

Rys lists several advantages of declarative languages, some of which apply to functional languages in general.

It seems I've become the editor responsible for XML related links around here lately, even though we have on board editors who are much more qualified for this than I am ;-).