The C11 and C++11 standards introduced some very useful features into the language. In particular they provided language-level access to threading and synchronisation primitives. So using the new standards we can write multithreaded code that compiles and runs on standard compliant platforms. I've tackled translating Windows and POSIX threads before, but not having to use a shim is fantastic news.
There's some ideas afoot to do something similar for higher level parallelism. I have a proposal for consideration at the April meetings - leveraging the existing OpenMP infrastructure.
Pretty much all compilers use OpenMP, a large chunk of shared memory parallel programs are written using OpenMP. So, to me, it seems a good idea to leverage the existing OpenMP library code, and existing developer knowledge. The paper is not arguing that we need take the OpenMP syntax - that is something that can be altered to fit the requirements of the language.
What do you think?
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Me thinks the idea makes sense. NVIDIA and her partners have recognized this and started OpenACC which is directives for parallelism as in OpenMP but for GPU acceleration.
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