Month: April 2017

That trash can Mac Pro that hasn’t been updated in years? It’s too hard to write software for.

Now, let’s be clear, there are any number of abstractions that have been created to help programmers parallelise their thing, from the process onward. If you’ve got a loop and can add the words #pragma omp parallel for to your code, then your loop can be run in parallel over as many threads as you like. It’s not hard.

Making sure that the loop body can run concurrently with itself is hard, but there are some rules to follow that either make it easy or tell you when to avoid trying. But you’re still only using the CPU, and there’s that whole dedicated GPU to look after as well.

Even with interfaces like OpenCL, it’s difficult to get this business right. If you’ve been thinking about your problem as objects, then each object has its own little part of the data – but now you need to get that information into a layout that’ll be efficient for doing the GPU work, then actually do the copy, then copy the results back from the GPU memory…is doing all of that worth it?

For almost all applications, the answer is no. For almost no applications, the answer is occasionally. For a tiny number of applications, the answer is most of the time, but if you’re writing one of those then you’re a scientist or a data “scientist” and probably not going to get much value out of a deskside workstation anyway.

What’s needed for that middle tier of applications is the tools – by which I mostly mean the libraries – to deal with this problem when it makes sense. You don’t need visualisations that say “hey, if you learned a different programming language and technique and then applied it to this little inner loop you could get a little speed boost for the couple of seconds that one percent of users will use this feature every week” – you need implementations that notice that and get on with it anyway.

The Mac Pro is, in that sense, the exact opposite of the Macintosh. Back in the 1980s, the Smalltalk software was ready well before there was any hardware that could run it well, and the Macintosh was a thing that took this environment that could be seen to have value, and made it kindof work on real hardware. Conversely, the Mac Pro was ready well before there was any software that could make use of it, and that’s a harder sell. The fact that, four years later, this is still true, makes it evident that it’s either difficult or not worth the effort to try to push the kind of tools and techniques necessary to efficiently use Mac Pro-style hardware into “the developer ecosystem”. Yes, there are niches that make very good use of them, but everybody else doesn’t and probably can’t.