In Isolation

“Firefox’s JavaScript engine becomes single-threaded“, extols Slashdot, and it’s a sign of the times as much as anything. It’s not a coincidence that most of the languages or concurrency libraries over the past few years have focused on message passing, on separate memory spaces, on isolation and on some sort of remoting.

The future is a small device where you want to keep power use low, where keeping the thread count down drops the responsibilities of the kernel as well as the mindless work necessary to coordinate.

The future is, potentially, a vast network of computers where your programs can start running in an instant on more computers, or even better, where it will always run in an undefined place.

The future is a desktop, laptop or tablet where power mostly isn’t an issue, but where it is simpler to think in queues, where nothing tramples on anything else.

No matter what precisely the future is, it is time to start hitting people in the head with lead pipes — figuratively! — when they try to attack pedestrian problems with anything that demands that you understand threading in detail to get it right.