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Microsoft Releases New Concurrent Programming Language
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Mon May 11, 2009 11:22 AM
from the secret-agent-man dept.
from the secret-agent-man dept.
zokier writes "Microsoft has released a new programming language called Axum, previously known as Maestro and based on the actor model. It's meant to ease development of concurrent applications and thus making better use of multi-core processors. Axum does not have capabilities to define classes, but as it runs on the .NET platform, Axum can use classes made with C#. Microsoft has not committed to shipping Axum since it is still in an incubation phase of development so feedback from developers is certainly welcome."
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WTF is a "Concurrent Programming Language"? (Score:5, Informative)
Now you know. [wikipedia.org]
Re:WTF is a "Concurrent Programming Language"? (Score:5, Insightful)
Because the PHBs like a single vendor. Nothing confuses them more than saying, "We're getting the OS from Microsoft, the database from Oracle, the language from Sun and the hardware from Dell." The less companies in this list, the better, regardless of the merits of technology.
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Re:WTF is a "Concurrent Programming Language"? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:WTF is a "Concurrent Programming Language"? (Score:5, Funny)
"What do you mean? We bought you Visual Studio with Visual C/C++ and Visual BASIC!"
Don't confuse them with facts. They'll just retaliate by making your life worse.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Visual BASIC is so unlike the BASICs I learned in the 80s on the Commodore, Apple, and other small computers that it might as well be a different language.
Also, MS isn't pushing developers to use C or C++ any more, they're pushing them to use C# and .NET, which are MS inventions.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
If you subscribe to certain philosophies, all ideas always existed, we simply discovered them.
Regardless of your adherence to such a philosophy, you have to admit that it doesn't really matter who created the idea, but who first successfully implemented it.
It's not like the people at Microsoft are somehow less capable because 100% of their ideas are 100% original, rather, they still had to have the intelligence to code it, document it, test it, etc.
Re:WTF is a "Concurrent Programming Language"? (Score:4, Interesting)
Because the PHBs like a single vendor. Nothing confuses them more than saying, "We're getting the OS from Microsoft, the database from Oracle, the language from Sun and the hardware from Dell." The less companies in this list, the better, regardless of the merits of technology.
This is not true of every Fortune 500 shop I've ever worked in. Most PHBs never met a platform they didn't like. Hell, at my current gig, we have mainframe, AS/400, Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, Linux (2 distros!), Windows, Oracle, DB/2, Sybase, MySQL, JBoss, Websphere, Cisco, Foundry, etc.
Lots of big shops are heterogenous to the point of pathology.
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
So the PHB can spend his time working on his golf game. (Oh, Oracle can help there, too, I'll bet.)
Where do you think most of the Oracle support contracts are negotiated?
Re:WTF is a "Concurrent Programming Language"? (Score:4, Insightful)
I thought the general consensus on this site especially with regards to open source software was that choice is a good thing? I'm sure if they used an existing language Microsoft would employ an embrace and extend strategy that would have developers/purists up in arms.
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Re:WTF is a "Concurrent Programming Language"? (Score:4, Insightful)
The Actors Model is around 40 years old. Scheme was based upon it. Lisp have already shown in the eighties to be good at concurrent programming. Just NIH syndrome.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Next question asked is WHY has Microsoft have to invent one when there are others available already?
Because you would whine and bitch about them "stealing" the language if they were to co-opt another concurrent programming language to run in their .NET environment.
Not "Insightful", "Clueless" (Score:5, Informative)
Because you would whine and bitch about them "stealing" the language if they were to co-opt another concurrent programming language to run in their .NET environment.
Come on, who ever complained about Microsoft "stealing" any of the existing languages supportted by .Net? That was not true for Eiffel or managed C++ or IronPython, or... you get the point.
Now it is true that C# was taken lock, stock and barrel from Java when the Microsoft embrace and extend strategy was slapped down there (read the memos), but no-one ever complained about other languages being added in just as no-one accuses Java of "stealing" all the languages that VM supports now. So using an existing concurrent language would make a lot of sense and annoy no-one.
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Re:Not "Insightful", "Clueless" (Score:5, Interesting)
Come on, who ever complained about Microsoft "stealing" any of the existing languages supportted by .Net? That was not true for Eiffel or managed C++ or IronPython, or... you get the point.
Actually there have been many criticisms of IronPython and Managed C++ in the usual "embrace, extend" whining on this site and on other tech sites.
So using an existing concurrent language would make a lot of sense and annoy no-one.
Bullshit. People would whine no matter what because it's Microsoft.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Probably the answer is "Because they can" and they see a business in locking in people into their environment.
Because they want to add to the .NET suite with a forward-thinking language. Like it or not, .NET is big for Microsoft, and giving people who use it more tools will only help their position. How you feel about that, of course, depends on how you feel about .NET and Microsoft.
Re:WTF is a "Concurrent Programming Language"? (Score:4, Funny)
Why develop TFT when there's already cathode ray tubes out there that will display picture?
Why invent new cars when there are clearly other cars out there that will get you from A to B?
Why invent motor powered vehicals when we have legs and bicycles?
Why invent geared bicycles when there are already pennyfarthings?
Why plant seeds when there's already food in my cupboard?
Why were you born when there're clearly other people out there that exist?
Stupid questions? Maybe, but you started it.
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Re:WTF is a "Concurrent Programming Language"? (Score:4, Insightful)
Next question asked is WHY has Microsoft have to invent one when there are others available already?
I'd suggest several major reasons: .NET Environment.
.NET, does give it a unique feature that distinguishes it from other concurrent languages (even if you loathe .NET, it still separates it from the rest).
1. Integration with the
2. Integration with the Visual Studio IDE.
3. Maximise control of the style of the language, featureset and its future direction.
If you check the wikipedia page the parent linked to, there are already stacks of concurrent programming languages available, it's not like there's some universal standard concurrency language out there Microsoft is trying to displace. That, and the above points, particularly with respect to
Probably the answer is "Because they can" and they see a business in locking in people into their environment.
Yes and no. You can take the whole lock-in argument (not entirely unreasonably), but you can also take the argument that for those who don't actually have a need to develop something for multiple platforms, a language fundamentally focused on a Windows-centric design with related tools is probably a huge positive. Why code in a language with a crap toolset/IDE (assuming there is one) and various other potential problems when MS offers one that plugs into .NET, VS, and is guaranteed to work great on Windows out of the box? That, and if you're already familiar with the above, the migration path I suspect is quite easy.
.NET based, Mono may or may not support some of this stuff. No idea.
Of course, this being
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Next question asked is WHY has Microsoft have to invent one when there are others available already?
As with most other Microsoft languages - because, while this is a research project currently, it may well become productized in 5 years, and at that point they'll want something that looks familiar, at least syntactically, to C# programmers, so as to not scare them away. It's not a new thing, either - Spec# [wikipedia.org] is a similar research language based on C#, but for Design by Contract (and bits of DbC based on it will be in .NET 4.0, though as library features, and not in the language proper). C-omega [wikipedia.org] was another p
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Next question asked is WHY has Microsoft have to invent one when there are others available already?
Yes, clearly the concurrent programming language problem is all wrapped up and doesn't need any further innovations or development.
It's ridiculous how hostile people are to what happen to be really cool Microsoft research projects. I know it doesn't mesh well with the idea that Microsoft steals everything and invents nothing but if you're more interested in Computer Science rather than pushing an anti-Micros
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
it's a programming language which splits up multiple threads of execution into different processes instead of threads.
That would be an incorrect definition of concurrent programming language. The actual implementation of executing multiple things isn't defined. There are many flaws in your "history lesson". OS/2 blew chunks when compared to NT at the time, and the SDK for OS/2 was a major pain to get anything working.
COM wasn't made after CORBA, it predated it, and it was developed by IBM. Much of CORBA was even based on COM, COM is mentioned all over the place in the original CORBA documentation. COM was licensed to
Focuses on Interfaces to Ease the Pain (Score:5, Informative)
in your channel class then you can communicate with agent instances that implement that channel quite easily like:
If the data can't be sent over a channel you use (and this word should sound familiar to you web guys) a schema.
From there on out it gets a lot more complicated with state and domain communications/sharing. It looks better thought out than most of Microsoft's libraries I've been forced to use but--as always--new languages need many releases before they are production worthy. A noble effort to simplify concurrency. With some really slick operator coding and overloading, you could probably get a similar thing going in Java or C++.
One last thing I'd like to bitch about is that this download is an MSI. Really? You really need to do that? For the love of christ, I'm a developer. Could you please just give me a standalone zipped up SDK directory that I could add to my path if I want to? I'm not even going to install this because it's going to get all up in my registry n' shit.
Re:Focuses on Interfaces to Ease the Pain (Score:5, Interesting)
One last thing I'd like to bitch about is that this download is an MSI. Really? You really need to do that? For the love of christ, I'm a developer. Could you please just give me a standalone zipped up SDK directory that I could add to my path if I want to? I'm not even going to install this because it's going to get all up in my registry n' shit.
While I realize that bitching about MS products is a common hobby, you could just extract the files directly [tech-recipes.com] and avoid any installation.
msiexec ships with Vista (and possibly earlier versions of Windows, I haven't checked). There are a number of third party programs that could do it as well, just look around.
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Re:Focuses on Interfaces to Ease the Pain (Score:5, Informative)
Off topic, but here goes.
The package must be shipped as a Windows Installer simply because it's got .NET objects in it. These objects must be installed in the Global Assembly Cache (GAC), which means they must be versioned and reference counted. It is possible (though unlikely) that the installer doesn't even create any registry entries.
Now, .NET was supposed to give us "xcopy installs", so it's possible that MS could ship a ZIP SDK pacakge; but then you'd be responsible for lugging around all of your dependencies from install to install of your own software. Plus, then MS would have to manage two different installation packages, and we all know how easy it is to keep different versions of the same thing in sync.
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Re:Focuses on Interfaces to Ease the Pain (Score:5, Funny)
For the love of christ, I'm a developer.
MS applies that term to Visual Basic users too, you know.
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Re:Focuses on Interfaces to Ease the Pain (Score:4, Informative)
With some really slick operator coding and overloading, you could probably get a similar thing going in Java or C++.
Except, of course, that Java does not do operator coding/overloading, or you'd have to tinker with the language itself (which is frowned upon by the Java community).
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Re:Focuses on Interfaces to Ease the Pain (Score:5, Informative)
As a developer you should be fully aware of the fact that you can extract the files from the MSI if you really want to. I'll help though. For most MSI files a simple:
msiexec /a filename.msi /qb TARGETDIR=C:\tmpdir
Will do what you want.
There is also the Less MSIerables app from the WiX project: http://sourceforge.net/projects/wix/ [sourceforge.net] that will let you extract the files directly. Plenty of tools to accomplish what you want if you'd take the 2 seconds to Google for it.
You should also be aware of the fact that the MSI probably goes ahead and integrates the SDK with Visual Studio so the libraries, binaries and help are in path and available without a bunch of extra crap to do on your part, which for me personally, I'd rather have it do than wasting my time trying to figure out what needs to be done even if they did bother to document everything.
I realize that most of the slashdot crowd thinks having to do everything from the command line based on a man page is a good thing, but for the rest of us it stopped being cool when we got out of school and had to get a job where they expected us to actually get shit done and not sit around all day with our thumbs up our asses playing with Linux.
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Re:Focuses on Interfaces to Ease the Pain (Score:4, Interesting)
After scanning the guide as well, it reads a lot like Erlang as "improved" by a Java/C# lover. You get a lot of syntax to make strict specification, which is a win, but the result is that the language isn't very light on its feet or Lispy in the way Erlang is.
For example: Axum seems to have a pretty strict type system, which gives you the ability to catch compile-time errors more cleanly, but on the other hand, there doesn't seem to be a simple way of creating a Tuple or Array literal without using a function. And at that, while it uses concurrency like Haskel or Erlang, it doesn't appear to be at all pure-functional, or maybe it is but the design is already burping with an "isolated" keyword that warns the compiler to forbid modification of static vars within the function body.
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
After scanning the guide as well, it reads a lot like Erlang as "improved" by a Java/C# lover.
It's probably just your perspective :) I'd say it's more like C# improved by an Erlang lover, and it's probably closer to the truth.
For example: Axum seems to have a pretty strict type system, which gives you the ability to catch compile-time errors more cleanly, but on the other hand, there doesn't seem to be a simple way of creating a Tuple or Array literal without using a function.
Actually, they have one example of an array literal in the paper - apparently, it's just curly braces:
For example, the following expression combines output from two interaction points ip1 and ip2 and passes the result on to an interaction point twoNumbers:
The expression above uses curly braces for array creation. In Axum, implicit array creation is a convenient syntactic construct that is used often when building network expressions ...
I don't know about tuple literals though. If they use the stock tuples from .NET 4.0 (as they probably should later on), which is System.Tuple generic class "overloaded" for varying number of type parameters, then tuples can be created with Tuple.Create(n1, n2, ...) call - whic
Re:Focuses on Interfaces to Ease the Pain (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know about "devlopers", but real developers use whatever OS they need to get the job done.
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Am I the only one who translates "fixed that for you" into "I'm a dumb, annoying fuck"?
My feedback (Score:4, Funny)
The windows version works great, but Axum on Linux isn't ready for prime time, yet. However, Axum is powerful enough that you should probably change your platform to permit its use, so if you have a new app being developed, I'd force your engineers to use Axum and develop it on windows.
And I know what I'm talking about because I'm an IT manager at a Fortune 500 company.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Exactly. More proprietary digital glop from Microsoft.
Re:My feedback (Score:5, Funny)
Axum on Linux isn't ready for prime time, yet. However, Axum is powerful enough that you should probably change your platform to permit its use, so if you have a new app being developed, I'd force your engineers to use Axum and develop it on windows.
I agree. I'm uninstalling Linux as we speak.
I expect 15% of the software to be written in Axum within 4 year, with the rest being split between Ruby on Rails, Silverlight and Adobe Flash Player (tm).
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This will be fun... (Score:5, Interesting)
The good points of a concurrent language (Score:5, Insightful)
I see Microsoft is doing its best to help developers all over the world create race conditions. I wonder how many programmers there are who never really 'got' concurrency. Hopefully I'm not one of them. (And no, there is no programming language that can prevent you from screwing it up.)
Concurrent programming is becoming increasingly important for any kind of high-performance project. This doesn't necessarily mean one needs a "concurrent programming language" to do it - but whatever the chosen mechanism, the goal is the same - write a program that uses all cores effectively. One way or another, professional programmers are going to need to 'get' concurrency in the coming years.
The benefit of a language that provides parallelization as a basic assumption is that the language itself can provide infrastructure (for message-passing, task-scheduling, and so on) useful to the task. Such a language encourages programmers to think about problems in terms of how they can be parallelized, but leaves the compiler or the runtime engine free to make decisions about how the parallelization is to occur.
Another benefit of such a language is that a language that takes certain ideas as base assumptions can help guide the programmer's approach to a solution. This can involve a significant learning curve for the programmer (see, for instance, Prolog or various functional languages...) but it can help programmers to achieve a new way of solving their problems: in this case, one that is rather well suited to the current needs of high-performance CPUs.
The challenge with synchronization in Axum, presumably, is that it's possible to write code that will run in the engine that won't conform to the rules for an "actor" - that it will perform some non-thread-safe access to a file, or that it will otherwise do something that won't be safe when run in parallel. From that perspective it's no different from (almost) any other language - as you say, it's still possible to screw up. What it does provide, however, are guidelines and framework to help keep you from screwing up.
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Concurrency isn't just for parallelism. (Score:3, Insightful)
You're making the mistake that concurrency is the same thing as parallelism. It is not. Concurrency is when a program is written in such a way that the order of execution of tasks is highly underspecified; parallelism is the use of multiple execution units to execute concurrent code.
Concurrency isn't just for performance; concurrency is just as much for writing software that can do many things at once. For example, one needs concurrency to have client applications that respond to the user with very low
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Your understanding is...flawed to put it nicely.
Feel free to provide more detail. Bear in mind there are people here who may not know all the details about .NET - and may not love it, either - but who would still be interested in learning more about it.
Initial Failures (Score:3, Interesting)
public Program()
{
// Receive command line arguments from port CommandLine
String [] args = recieve(PrimaryChannel::CommandLine);
// Send a message to port ExitCode;
PrimaryChannel::ExitCode <-- 0; }
I can't help but think that their idea of "Channels" is really a message queue, which listeners pull messages from. This is easily implemented in around 30-40 lines of Python, Queues, Tasks and Listeners. And since Python supports these crazy things called CLASSES, it's really quite easy to implement new features or override base functionality.
In other words, this is an incredible waste of time. Put all these kids to work on IronPython and close this crap down.
Naming vs architecture (Score:4, Funny)
previously known as Maestro and based on the actor model
Somebody has their performance arts mixed up
Queue a new internet Want ad (Score:5, Insightful)
Wanted:
Senior Software Engineer
Windows Platforms
MFC C++ - 10 Years
C# - 5 years
Axum - 5 years
You *know* it's going to happen.
Was C# Not Enough? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Was C# Not Enough? (Score:4, Informative)
Its not a threading language, its a distributed concurrency language like erlang. So its designed to send messages locally or across a cluster, in a fast, safe,and easy manner. Yes, you could do everything in c# that it does, but not easily. Look over the documentation and you'll find some things that would be odd to you as a c# developer. Some sections that won't let you modify a variable's contents, to keep certain sections free of side affects.
Basically its a different way of doing things that should help create easy,bug free, high performance, concurrent software.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It's not about threading - all the features you describe relate to dealing with concurrency in a small scale. New concurrent languages are targeted at algorithms that use concurrency as a fundamental building block - a language construct, if you like - which let you use completely different algorithms to what you would use otherwise.
Totally contrived example: imagine you want to count the number of upper case characters in a large string. You could zip through it in a loop in a single thread. But t
Re:So, where did they steal this idea from? (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, it does use the same concurrency model as Erlang, but Erlang has no concept of classes. Perhaps Scala, which I know little about except that it runs on the JVM and is supposedly better at concurrency.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
"but Erlang has no concept of classes."
One of Erlang's strengths.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, I wouldn't say that classes are bad in and of themselves, but trying to bolt classes onto Erlang certainly wouldn't make sense.
Re:So, where did they steal this idea from? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:So, where did they steal this idea from? (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm not affiliated, but I do own their dev kit
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Re:So, where did they steal this idea from? (Score:4, Informative)
From the looks of things, C.A.R. Hoare's Communicating Sequential Processes [usingcsp.com] (yes, the same guy who invented Quicksort). Well, Professor Hoare presently works at Microsoft Research, so I guess he may have more than passing involvement in the project. It's the basis for many other concurrent programming languages such as Occam, Erlang, and Limbo to name a few.
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I heard that the Hilton model will infect you with viruses...
Re:R&D (Score:4, Insightful)
> I haven't seen may apps that properly use OO
True, but it's very nice for program libraries - boost, wxWidgets, Qt, etc (yes I'm a C++ programmer) - where people who know what they're doing have already done the difficult stuff for the rest of us.
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