On important technologies: LLVM, CocoaTouch, Caching, Multi-core designs
As far as I am concerned, LLVM, CocoaTouch and memory based cache servers make up the the set of software technologies that will affect all things computing next year onwards.
LLVM is going to push code compilation and optimization to the next level. Building a new language is borderline trivial using LLVM technology. You produce the IR and the LLVM backend takes care of everything for you. I will be surprised f the 'fastest' Javascript implementation for 2009 won't be based on LLVM.
Apple's CocoaTouch is so well done, so well thought out (we are still on iPone SDK 1.0 and that speaks volumes) that it will be hard not to imagine Apple advancing and reusing the technology on, say, tablets and even making available the CocoaTouch extensions to OS X existing frameworks features set.
The ever increasing complexity of web-based services along with the rising number of users of those services and the need to sustain a user experience that depends on responding to user's actions as fast as possible, calls for the kind of tools and services that utilize intelligent RAM based caching. By caching just about everything, thanks to the ratio of reads/writes, gets/puts, resources (CPU, disks, etc) use drops by orders of magnitude while at the same time satisfying the need for a perceived fast responses to a matching requests. Developers and researchers most likely will come up with even better systems, ones that deal with cache coherency transparently, mirroring and synchronization, etc. This new realization may even render expensive, large and over-complicated systems irrelevant(e.g Oracle RDBMS). The only potential problem is the saturation of the network links, which is another class of problems researchers should look into in the near future.
On the CPUs side, everyone seems to have finally agreed that we can no longer scale vertically. We have to scale horizontally by exploiting parallelization and multi-core designs, potentially coupled with technologies such as NUMA. The Cell processor, Sun's UltraSPARC T, Intel's and AMD Multi-Core designs are build on that principles. Using all those cores('threads') efficiently, both in therms of throughput, scheduling and access to system resources is not (going to be) an easy task, but the benefits and the need to go forward justify this new approach, if not make it necessary. I personally couldn't be more excited about the possibilities availed by those architectures.
Saturday, 13 December 2008 1:33 pm