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Comment by ska | Hacker News Reader

I’m not certain an overstatement. I’m not convinced either. As you note these ideas are old (they mostly predate C# and .NET by decades). On the other hand, to a first order approximation, C# has made zero impact in this area. There are a bunch of reasons, but that’s the way it is.

Fair or not, Julia does seem to have the potential to be the first really interesting shift in this area in ages. Doesn’t mean it will get there, but there is interest.

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I was pointing out another very mainstream language (even more than Go and far more than Erlang) that has the same abilities.

What do you mean by impact/shift exactly? I guess I'm not understanding what's suddenly going to change now since, as you say, these ideas are old and implemented several times before.

What I mean is that C# has not been taken up for heavy numeric work in a significant way.

Julia, for good or ill, seems to have some potential to be.

Task concurrency is probably not a great idea for heavy numeric work anyways, right? I’m scratching my head a bit about what the use case for this is in Julia given that there are much better ways of doing parallelism already.

Which ways are those?

Data parallelism mostly.

We're not talking about concurrency, but actual parallelism.

Anyway, if by data parallelism you mean simd, then that is already available and widely used in Julia. Multithreading comes on top of that.

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