Re: What will many cores mean to future Windows releases?

Paul Nichols [TeamB] wrote:
Esteban Pacheco wrote:
This is a good article about what is going on with Microsoft around the new trend on Multi Core devlopment.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=485

You got to love AMD Opterons :)

Yeah make an operating system, like Vista, that requires all of them :)

Now why do I need a 2 gz. processor and a gig of ram just to run the OS again?


Agreed.

We used to call this "sloppy or bad programming/skills". Now its call "innovation"!


Well, perhaps is better to enhance the language in order to improve the developer's thinking and ways of expression, not to build complicated abstraction isolation layers/VM hoping that they'll catch the programmer's faults. IMHO, is much easier to prevent than to cure.

In our case, can a managed code layer / VM help me not to write things like:

procedure Foo;
var
i: integer;
lTemp: TStringList;

begin
lTemp.Add('a');
lTemp.Add('b');
lTemp.Add('c');
for i:=0 to lTemp.Count do
writeln(lTemp[i]);
end;

And can a VM catch the (at least) three mistakes which are hidden in the above code?

IMHO, is much better to have language/compiler enhancements in order to have a much safer code:

procedure Foo;
var
lTemp: TStringList;
cLine: string;
begin
lTemp.Add('a');
lTemp.Add('b');
lTemp.Add('c');
for cLine in lTemp do
writeln(cLine);
end;

And a warning at the compile time 'Object lTemp might be not initialized.' and 'Object lTemp might be not freed'. Or have an option (as we have in the FastMM) to tell where we have memory leaks.

(We have already the for..in construction but the above warnings I don't know if it's possible to implement).

my 2c,

m. Th.
.