If you can't make a language fast, make it parallel

I'm not convinced that parallelism is something that <i>needs</i> support at the language level. The only languages that do this are Go and Erlang (off the top of my head).<p>Others like Clojure and Scala have more support at the standard library level.

My favorite features of Erlang/OTP in descending order:<p>1. built-in distribution (i.e. Erlang distributed RPC)<p>2. bit-syntax<p>3. light-weight processes<p>4. pattern-matching

Let's face it - it's not the language that is the problem. It would help you, but it would help you only with some percentage of the problems out there.<p>For example - there does not exist a practical language (or design) where you can implement the LZ compression (ZLIB, others) in parallel, so that it gives the same results as the sequential "c" version.<p>It's just that certain algorithms, hence protocols, data structures, standards are not suited for parallel processing that well.<p>Okay, in the first case, maybe you can split the incoming data by 128kb and process each other individually ... but that's not the same - you can't reuse the LZ window.<p>Really the problem is the 13 dwarfs that university folks have identified - 13 stereotypical problems that relate to 99% of what's being done with a programming language - some of the dwarfs are just speedy parallel gnomes, some of them are old slow stubborn, like Gimli from LOTR.<p><a href="http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2006/EECS-2006-183.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2006/EECS-2006-18...</a>

It's worth noting we (the team that's building Skynet) didn't set out to build a parallel language, we set out to build a distributed one. It turns out that a lot of the things that make Spin a good distributed language also make it a good parallel one.

tophercyll, can you give an invite to skynet? Nice blog post, but you need to give references/links for Spin and Skynet. Otherwise it's just an ad trick...