Hi all,

I'm in the decision phase of writing a high demanding application. The most demanding task is related with (approximate) string matching algorithms (suffix trees, dynamic programming, edit distances, maybe eulerian paths, etc...). Previous related applications (mostly written >5 years ago) were written in high performance programming languages like C/C++, but I wonder if today's muti-core architecture opens a new way of facing this kind of applications (through concurrent programming languages).

Trying to solve this question, I've been checking current possibilities in concurrent programming languages and I've been surprised by the overwhelming number of alternatives that are being developed

Functional programming style seems to facilitate the development of concurrent programs (no side effects). Among these, Erlang and its asynchronous message passing model is probably the one that is getting more attention, but there are other examples like Haskell, Clojure (acts through the JVM), Alice or Clean.

There are more alternatives out there not stuck in the functional paradigm like Scala (which runs on the JVM), cilk (concurrent C), Oz/Mozart, occam... and over 20 more possibilities!!. Not counting recent develops like Fortress, Chapel or IBM's X10

Wow... there are many possibilities, aren't they? Some questions (most of them probably without answer) comes to mind:

• Is multicore programming the near-mid future of programming? and if so, is Perl doing any effort (maybe trough Perl6) in that direction?
• Will the functional programming languages become more relevant with the multi-core revolution?
• In terms of program execution speed, will it worth to choose a "slower" programming language that allows easy (built-in) concurrent programming over "fast" single-core programming language?
• Will it worth to start today my project in one of those concurrent programming languages?
• Which ones will survive, which will be abandoned and which will be a reference for concurrent programming?

As always, any comment would be highly appreciated

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