High performance computing made quite some progress lately. Maybe you heard about the reactive manifesto (you should if you are a reader of this blog ;-)), if not, it is an interesting readying … if nothing else as a conversational icebreaker.
Basically the manifesto preaches for systems more responsive and reliable by reacting to requests and dusting it into smaller requests processed by smaller and autonomous systems. This is nothing new, but quite far from traditional processing where single monolitic application took care of requests from reception to response.
There are several programming patterns useful for implementing a reactive system, channels (and streams which are quite the same thing) are one of them. A channel allows you to define a data flow with inputs, computation units, merge, split and collector of information coming in sequence into your system. Once the dataflow is defined, the data flows into it and results come out from the other end.
In this talk Felix Petriconi describes his implementation of channels for C++. Continue reading “++it18 – Channels are Useful, not only for Water”