Re: The development tendency of compilation tech?

Nick wrote:
> What's new in compilers? Very little. I think in 10 years, compiling
> will be largely forgotten.
>
> Diversity in computing is over. Long gone are the days of
> free-spirited innovation, today hardware and software development
> appear to be in a sort of lock step. More and more computing is done
> with the products of Big Brothers 1 and 2, and management appears to
> have been conditioned not to accept anything outside of the
> mainstream.
>
> Except maybe where there is lots to be gained by more performant and
> non-conformant application software, there is reduced incentive to
> accept or develop anything like a new language, let alone compile it.
> What ever happened to massively parallel and array architectures, or
> more accurately, why doesn't any of this ever reach the mainstream?


I'm not at all convinced that this is especially relevant. It may
well be true that advances in compiler technology (as separate from
advances in languages) do not matter to the vast majority of desktop
computers, but there are other computers in the world....


In particular, it seems to me (although I'm too young to have been
there) that there was a substantial amount of work being put into
compiler technology in the time period between 1950 and 1970. It also
seems to me that the market for multiprocessor compute servers -- not
web servers, but research machines doing physics simulations and the
like -- is at least as large now as it was then, and those are still
just as much situations where there is lots to be gained by higher
compiler performance.


(See also: Google, who seem to have no problems with embracing language
innovation, are going to be in desperate need of more computing power
for the forseeable future, and alone probably buy more computers in a
year than existed in the late 1960s.)


So it seems to me that if you're looking in the large pile of desktop
and laptop internet-and-Word-appliance computers for the future of
compilers, the reason you're not seeing much future is just that that's
the wrong place to look!


- Brooks, who's perfectly happy with a 300MHz laptop, these days.


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