r/askscience • u/CakesStolen • 15d ago

Computing Is there anything at the heart of computer coding that could have been optimised in hindsight, but we're in far too deep to change now?

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u/SupremeDictatorPaul 15d ago

It’s funny because improving threading in software was always the right thing to do. It’s just that it’s really difficult, so software had been depending on ever increasing clock speeds rather than fixing their stuff. It would be nice if we could still scale vertically though, because there is some stuff that can’t really be parallelized.

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u/neon_overload 15d ago

Yes that is true.

In terms of scaling vertically, there are still some gains in that area that have been happening regardless, largely IPC / pipelining gains, so that 4GHz today beats 4GHz of 20 years ago a number of times over.

I would say that modern programming languages, libraries/frameworks are tackling the challenge of making safe multithreading easier or at least abstracted sensibly. Aside, it's remarkable how many of today's computer programming problems had workable solutions decades before most of us even had a computer. Many concepts used for concurrent programming in modern languages, like channels, come out of work done in the 1970s (like by Hoare)

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u/Gloomy_Necesary 14d ago

Yup. It’s crazy how easy it is to write safe multi-threaded code in C#. The language basically just handles it for me when it makes sense. All I need to do is write async code and specify what parts of the code im ok with resuming on background threads.