The Free Lunch is Over fo OO Programmers

Herb Sutter is currently a software architect at Microsoft and chair of the ISO C++ standards committee.

The Free Lunch Is Over: A Fundamental Turn Toward Concurrency in Software by Herb Sutter

The biggest sea change in software development since the OO revolution is knocking at the door, and its name is Concurrency.

Your free lunch will soon be over. What can you do about it? What are you doing about it?

The major processor manufacturers and architectures, from Intel and AMD to Sparc and PowerPC, have run out of room with most of their traditional approaches to boosting CPU performance. Instead of driving clock speeds and straight-line instruction throughput ever higher, they are instead turning en masse to hyperthreading and multicore architectures. Both of these features are already available on chips today; in particular, multicore is available on current PowerPC and Sparc IV processors, and is coming in 2005 from Intel and AMD. Indeed, the big theme of the 2004 In-Stat/MDR Fall Processor Forum was multicore devices, as many companies showed new or updated multicore processors. Looking back, it’s not much of a stretch to call 2004 the year of multicore.

And that puts us at a fundamental turning point in software development, at least for the next few years and for applications targeting general-purpose desktop computers and low-end servers (which happens to account for the vast bulk of the dollar value of software sold today). In this article, I’ll describe the changing face of hardware, why it suddenly does matter to software, and how specifically it matters to you and is going to change the way you will likely be writing software in the future.

Arguably, the free lunch has already been over for a year or two, only we’re just now noticing.