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Concurrency, a roast, and a burrito

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A bunch of session yesterday at C++ Connections on concurrency, threading, and the like.  Highlights included Herb Sutter's session on The Concurrency Landscape, in which in touched on a lot of topics from his The Free Lunch is Over paper.  This really is important food for thought for everyone that writes software: we've all been able to rely on the fact that our programs perform better on newer machines because chips keep getting faster.  In the future, chips are more likely to scale "horizontally" with additional cores than "vertically" by cranking up the clock speed.  This means that if we do not take advantage of opportunities for concurrency in our code, our customers will not have the same happy experience by installing our software on newer hardware -- performance is likely to remain fairly flat.  After Herb's talk, Kelvin Henney followed with a more hand-on look at how to solve some concurrency problems, and Andrei Alexandrescu discussed lock-free data structures.  The lock-free stuff is cool... the idea is that the normal locks and blocks and waits and all of that associated with concurrent programming are performance drags and bug magnets, so wouldn't it be cool to have data structures that worked concurrently without needing to manage locks and blocking?  The problem is that it's hard to do.  As Herb pointed out, it's hard for geniuses to get right.

The evening event was a roast of Bjarne Stroustrup.  It wasn't a traditional roast, where folks went up to the mic to tell embarrassing stories and such.  Instead, Bjarne sat alone on the stage while members of the audience were encouraged to ask questions in the form of, "What the hell were you thinking when you..." Everyone was of course very polite (unlike your garden variety roast), and his answers were both humorous and insightful.  I was also impressed with Bjarne's willingness to gamely subject himself to being peppered with questions like that; there aren't a lot of folks of his stature that would do that.  Perhaps his most keen observation, though, was his declaration that Budweiser is not beer.  :)

At the end of the evening, the VC team went out to dinner at a Mexican food place in the Luxor.  Brandon Bray, Ulzii Luvsanbat, and I were drawn to a menu item called "El Champion" that included a 35 oz. burrito and a large margarita, with a t-shirt going to any hardy individual capable of finishing both.  Suffice it to say that three t-shirts were had that evening.  And I can now comfortably skip a couple meals.

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