No free performance gains anymore, says DDJ

Dr. Dobb's Journal published lately an article by Herb Sutter about the future of the software development.

Sutter's idea is that up to today, the processor technology has leaped forward performance wise, and by writing software just as we have always done, we as application developers have gotten better performance for free.

Now all this is coming to an end, says Sutter. Instead, developers need to focus on real concurrency in the future to see better performance from their hardware. This is because it isn't anymore easy to just increase the clock speeds, among other things.

So what to do? Concurrency is the key here, and it should get mainstream. Just like OOP did in the 1990s.

This is all well, but to program for concurrency, you need to have better tools and also better frameworks. Will we get those is to be seen.

Oh, speaking of performance, I also recommend checking out Yaniv Pessach's article on the June 2005 issue of MSDN Magazine about hyper-threading. This article is very good reading.