Question

I often hear about other languages promoted as being more suitable for multi-core/concurrent programming e.g. Clojure, Scala, Erlang etc. but I’m a little confused about why I need to worry about multiple cores, shouldn’t the Java/.NET VM handle that automatically and if not, what are the reasons behind it?

Is it because those languages mentioned are functional and have some intrinsic advantage over non-functional languages?

Answer 1

The reason you need to care is that processors are generally speaking not getting any faster. Instead more of them are being added to computers in the form of additional cores. In order for a program to take advantage of the extra processors it generally speaking must use multiple threads to do so. Java, and most other languages, will not automatically use more threads in your program. This is something you need to manually do.

Some people prefer functional style languages like Scala, Erlang and F# to non-functional for multi-threaded programming. Functional languages tend to be at least shallowly immutable by default and hence in theory are easier to work with in multi-threaded situations.

Here is a very good article on this subject

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