ParaSail: Parallel Specification and Implementation Language

Check out the Designing ParaSail, A New Programming Language blog for upcoming ParaSail talks in Edinburgh and Portland.

What is ParaSail, and why should you care?

The number of cores in our processors proliferate, but individual programs continue to do a poor job at parallel processing. Sure, your OS can run your email client on one core and your image editing on another. But how about running that image editor's compression algorithm on a batch of 17 files efficiently, spread across your four, six or more cores? That's a job for the application, or just perhaps, the compiler.

ParaSail is a new, concise programming language that by its design makes it intuitive for developer to write programs that can be efficiently processed in parallel and, at the same time, be inherently safe and secure. In fact the language's constructs hinder writing in declarative style. Principal designer S. Tucker Taft claims that the programmer has to work harder to force sequential evaluation.

As multi-core processors proliferate, languages such as ParaSail will help applications take advantage of increased throughput by easily and reliably executing in parallel at the thread, not application, level.

JDM