Felix' Blog

In my last post I told you something about parallel libraries. I will talk about some of these in further posts. First at all I have to define: What is a good library for me? There are several metrics for a good library. Here are mine:

• Stable, library doesn’t crash the application
• Easy to use, simple API
• High performance (speed, memory consumption)
• High Portability
• Further support

A library should not cover all the problems in software development. I prefer to use more good libraries than one giant library. A library is a piece of code that is very specialist. Library developers should be aware of, that their library would be in use over the next 10 years. Developing a library sounds very easy. But developing a simple library that covers the most problems, for which the library is created for, is one of the hardest jobs in software development. I will show you some examples, which show both sides (good and bad) in further posts here.

So long, stay tuned

Multi threading creates a lot of new competitions in software development. Software engineering has a answer to simplify parallel programming: use a library. The library will do all the hard stuff for you. There are different parallel libraries for different languages.

• Java: java.util.concurrent, especially since JDK 1.7 Java will provide a huge range of build-in solutions.
• Java: other Libraries are available (Parallel Java Library, http://www.cs.rit.edu/~ark/pj.shtml)
• .Net: since .Net 4.0 Microsoft released the Task Parallel Library, great interface
• C++: My favorite are the Intel Threading Building Blocks, improved interface, thanks to C++0x

I will pick some of these libraries in further posts.

So long