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Comment by bottled_poe | Hacker News Reader

This is not a language problem. It’s an algorithm design problem. There’s no silver bullet. The basic principle is to divide the problem space into independent blocks of work. How to achieve that depends on the problem.

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For a good example, there's a tricky parallelization problem in physical simulation, which you have update edge/triangle/bending wing forces in a mesh structure without any race conditions. (This becomes especially thorny if you want to parallelize your algorithm to the GPU.) A surprising solution for this is graph coloring, where you "color" each element without having two elements that interfere with each other the same color. Then you can safely parellelize the updates of all elements inside each color group, since the same color guarantees absolutely no interference.

Algorithm design problems, when general enough, warrant being treated as language problems!

Every feature of programming languages started in this fashion.

Indeed, the holy grail (or perhaps the rapture) of programming languages is a compiler which generates the entire program with zero human-written code. I fear it may be on the horizon.

There are programming languages e.g. occam designed with the intention of exposing parallelism algebraically, but I wouldn't call them a silver bullet either.

They are great in theory, but sucks in practice.

We don't have good optimising compiler for that

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