Cilk Programing Language Wins Most Influential Award | Hacker News Reader

Cilk Programing Language Wins Most Influential Award

cilk.com

23 pointsiamelgringo18 comments

Don't know about you, guys, but I find their website completely unappealing and off-putting. The actual technical stuff is quite interesting, but their use of consumer-style marketing techniques does an excellent job of killing any desire to learn about it. Trademarked buzzwords, a video of CEO discussing "key values", a "blog" that reads like a marketing presentation, etc. It's clear that they are trying to target suits rather than developers, and that's quite unfortunate.

I agree with your assessment of their website, but the paper itself looks really interesting. The author also mentions a paper that he liked from the same conference:

"PS: I would also like to mention another deserving paper from PLDI 1998: 'Optimizing direct-threaded code by selective inlining,' by Ian Piumarta and Fabio Riccardi. This paper describes the technology that was later used in QEMU, and it qualifies in my opinion as one of the greatest hacks of all time."

Then perhaps you'd like the original project page: http://supertech.csail.mit.edu/cilk/

so let's say the team actually wants to target developers rather than suits - what are the key things you'd change about the web site?

thanks in advance.

It's easy: show me the code. Links to quick examples and tutorials that show me what and how this language can do are amazingly useful. Pretty much you want the primary focus to be on using your language, not selling it. You have a navbar across the top; at first glance I know for 100% certainty only what two of those links will do for me ("home" and "company").

In short, look at http://python.org/ , http://www.perl.org/ , and http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/ . Focus on enabling the developer to do something useful as soon as possible. Focus on community, libraries, etc... If you make one change and only one change to the site, add a link titled "Getting started"... make it a wiki. See http://www.erlang.org/starting.html for more inspiration. Right now it feels like the marketing department designed the the cilk site.

thank you.

Does the following help? (A link to the alpha documentation.) http://www.cilk.com/resources-for-multicoders/documentation-...

We will post a bunch of code examples as well, but wanted to get something up sooner than later.

Here's one screencast on some of the technology: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FjGKLYINGsg

Here's the (alpha) documentation and code samples: http://www.cilk.com/resources-for-multicoders/for-developers...

Incidentally, one of the languages it has influenced is Sun's Fortress, which is growing in popularity. The 'work stealing' behavior pioneered by Clik operates in the background, making implicit parallelization fast and practical.

This is a quick look at its syntax. http://supertech.csail.mit.edu/cilk/intro.html

It seems to be a mutlithreaded language based on C, with actually sane and readable syntax. ---------- Ok nevermind. It just looks like C, with some mutlithreaded facilities (spawn and sync). You still have to use malloc, and all the little things that make C a slow to code language are still there.

Cilk++ is a considerable upgrade to MIT Cilk: support for C++ (rather than just C), for Visual Studio (rather than just GCC), support for loops (rather than just recursion). It's considerably more transparent to the developer.

Seeing the first code example on that page told me far more about what Cilk actually is than that entire press release.

I like the concept. SIGPLAN goes back to the papers from 10 years before and decides which one was the most influential. I would say that is a prestigious award indeed.

It's sad that they removed source code from they website, some time ago I've downloaded it to play with but it's gone now. So much for licensing.

There's http://supertech.csail.mit.edu/cilk/cilk-5.4.6.tar.gz and it appears to have been last updated in Oct 2007.

Hmmm... Am I blind or this link was not present at that time? Anyway, thanks for your help!

Here's the (alpha) documentation and code samples: http://www.cilk.com/resources-for-multicoders/for-developers...

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