C++ as it is today does not support threads. Neither does C. C++0x is the next revision of the C++ Standard. A number of new features are proposed including Concepts, Garbage Collection and Concurrency. This talk will describe the addition of C++0x features that facilitate concurrency. This includes a memory model, atomic operations, thread-local storage, threads API, support for C+ constructors and destructors, to thread pools and futures. OpenMP is a shared memory parallel specification and they are also adding task-based parallelism to support irregular tasks in the next revision. In the hardware, multicore chips are now available on laptops. The concurrency revolution is here and this will help you understand it. If there is time, garbage collection will also be covered.

Michael Wong is the IBM and Canadian representative to the C++ Standard Committee and is the co-author of a number C++0x features including generalized attributes, extensible literals, inheriting constructors, and explicit conversion operators. He is also IBM’s OpenMP representative currently actively engaged in revising the OpenMP Specification. He is the past C++ team lead to IBM’s XL C++ compiler and has been designing C++ compilers for fifteen years. His current research interest is in the area of parallel programming, C++ benchmark performance, generic programming and template metaprogramming.

He holds a B.Sc from University of Toronto, and a Masters in Mathematics from University of Waterloo. In prior life, he was an astronomer and a physicist but found he could not make a living. Today, he lives in Toronto with his wife and young child, while traveling internationally pretending to be a language lawyer.