GoingDeep: oncurrency and Parallelism: Native (C/C++) and Managed (.NET) Perspectives

Parallel Computing Platform team members Stephen Toub, Rick Molloy, Don McCrady and Dana Groff join me for a chat about the differences and similarities in their conceptual approach to designing and building concurrent programming abstractions targeting .NET developers and native (C/C++) developers. Besides the obvious semantic (and runtime) differences between purely managed (.NET) and native code (C/C++), how does the Parallel Computing Platform team develop technologies for each domain and how are these technologies different? Surely, system level developers need system level tooling support that can improve their experience with writing native code that can effectively (and safely) scale to 8 cores (and that's nothing. How many cores will be the norm in 5-8 years? Mostly likely significantly more than 8....). There’s no PLINQ for C++, for example. That said, the fundamental problems the Parallel Computing Platform team are trying to solve span languages and runtimes, but are the differences only in implementation details and programming abstractions? What's the same? What's different? How? Why? This is another great conversation with some of the folks designing and building technologies that will ultimately, in one form or another, converge into tools (or components of tools) that will help software developers effectively, efficiently and reliably compose applications and services in a Many Core world. Enjoy!