Well, I saw on The Register the other day that Intel had released a toolkit consisting of several plug-ins for Microsoft Visual Studio to support Multi-core development.

Having said so much on the topic, and having a long-running interest in compiler theory, of course I downloaded it during a week that I was crazy-busy enough that I couldn’t even get this blog out ;-).

I’ve installed it, but haven’t tried it out yet. This blog is just to ponder if multi-core development is finally about to grow up. As much as there is opportunity for a small player in the space, eventually the big compiler vendors had to get involved – if “involved” means Intel writes a plug-in for Visual Studio, then so be it.

The road we’re on can only end in one place – mainstream developers being able to take advantage of the cores in any given system without having to worry about it. As I’ve said before, an Enterprise Developer isn’t paid to toy with tweaking CPU usage except in very rare cases – they are paid to solve business problems and help their organization be more competitive. Any time they have to spend worrying about this largely hardware issue is wasted.

So I’m glad to see the movement. I don’t know how soon I’ll have time to take it for a test run, but I promise to continue this series when I’m done. I’m thinking a mutli-core enabled app for processing the results of a get_all_statistics() call in iControl is a good idea, and the return data is an array, so it should be easily segmented… We’ll see how easy that is to implement with these tools.

Until then,

Don.

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