Sierpień 2010

Message passing’s major flaw is the inversion of control–it is a moral equivalent of gotos in un-structured programming (it’s about time somebody said that message passing is considered harmful). MP still has its applications and, used in moderation, can be quite handy; but PGAS offers a much more straightforward programming model–its essence being the separation of implementation from algorithm. The Platonic ideal would be for the language to figure out the best parallel implementation for a particular algorithm. Since this is still a dream, the next best thing is getting rid of the interleaving of the two in the same piece of code.

This is a debugging helper class which lets you set breakpoints on the fly from within code. This is mainly useful for the case where you have a variable that you know is getting trashed, but you have no idea who is trashing it. You can cause the debugger to break in at the very moment the variable is changed. The really cool thing is that this makes use of the Intel Pentium's built-in debug registers, which means that it really will stop no matter what code is executing, even if it's down in the NT kernel, in a different thread, or whatever.