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Comment by karlding | Hacker News Reader

Peter Buhr also teaches CS 343: Concurrent and Parallel Programming [0] at the University of Waterloo in a dialect of C++ that he has been working on [1], called uC++ [2].

[0] https://www.student.cs.uwaterloo.ca/~cs343/

[1] https://github.com/pabuhr/uCPP

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CE%9CC%2B%2B

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[on the Cforall team] One of our Master's students has incorporated the majority of the uC++ features into Cforall as well, with some neat extensions for multi-monitor locking in a way that doesn't introduce synchronization deadlocks not present in user code.

As an alumni, I firmly believe there's room for a 4th year course in-addition to CS343. There's quite a lot in advanced control flow which can be covered.

I've always found it unfortunate that the university has courses from first year all the way to fourth year in Data Structures and Algorithms (all the way up to CS466/CS666) but Control Flow is treated like a secondary citizen.

[also a CS 343 TA] I personally agree with you -- if it were up to me I'd refactor CS 343 into a pair of courses, maybe focusing on high-level concurrency constructs with a follow-up course on building that sort of runtime system.

I personally really hated the use of uC++ and would have loved to do the whole course in some MIPS dialect. I really liked how through most of second year the only language reference I really needed to look at fit on one piece of paper (https://www.student.cs.uwaterloo.ca/~cs241/mips/mipsref.pdf). The uC++ language, on the other hand, is not specified anywhere except in the enormous 600 page textbook, and even then very far from fully specified (e.g. there was a builtin function called rendezvous-something, where that string literally only appeared in the book once, and it was not defined at that place)

I'd argue that's the point of moving from a 2nd year course to a 3rd year one. You incrementally add more complexity. The ISO C++ spec is a similar heavy tome.

What a waste of tuition money.

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