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> Performance/$ is still going to rise

But is performance/core also going to keep rising? Or do we need smart compilers/languages to make use of all the cheap cores?

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We need a correct, expressive language that easily lets you makes use of all those cheap cores. Sort of like Erlang.

I mean, this conversation has been around for easily 10 years. We live in a world where we already have to do this—look at all the progress in the last decade on the prevalence of futures, async i/o, and channels/queues/whatever. Memory bandwidth and latency has proven to be far more of a performance drag that has improved far slower—the likely areas that will lead to performance problems will be in areas other than single-core clock speed.

Well, that -- the Memory bottleneck -- is precisely why we need a rethink of platforms and tool chains.

Languages will provide the semantics (in context of memory hierarchy) of data locality, and compilers that optimize for that.

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> is precisely why we need a rethink of platforms and tool chains.

My point was, people are already thinking. It's not an easy problem and there's no obvious way forward.

As it turns out, Erlang is already providing much better memory locality than your average language. Each process runs in a contiguous memory area (heap+stack) which fits perfectly with a many-core world.

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