Axum - New Parallel Programming Language from Microsoft  |  June 29, 2009  

I mentioned last week that I am trying to develop a better understanding of parallel coding issues and approaches.

Microsoft has a new language for parallel programming in the works named Axum. It was formerly known as "Maestro". There is a channel 9 video on the MS site about the effort from last year. Axum is an Domain Specific Modeling research project that Microsoft is creating to help programmers tackle the issue of parallel programming in the .NET environment. It looks like it is even available for download.

Phillips, a program manager on Microsoft's Parallel Computing Platform team, describes the language as:

"Axum is an incubation project from Microsoft's Parallel Computing Platform that aims to validate a safe and productive parallel programming model for the .NET framework. It's a language that builds upon the architecture of the Web and the principles of isolation, agents and message-passing to increase application safety, responsiveness, scalability and developer productivity. Other advanced concepts we are exploring are data flow networks, asynchronous methods and type annotations for taming side-effects."

He also stated:

"We're not talking about objects as a primary concept anymore; it's object-aware rather than object-oriented. In fact, you can't even define objects in Axum. It's special-purpose, so we don't intend for Axum to be the general-purpose language that C# is. You're going to define objects and types in another language like Visual Basic or C# and then you can use Axum to coordinate and get safe concurrency out of it."

The reason specialized language research is important to business is because programming parallel solutions is very complex and error prone. It is not something mere mortals can do effectively with today's tools. New tools and approaches will be required and this is an example of a start. It will be interesting to see how modeling techniques will be integrated with this approach, since Microsoft has been working in the domain specific modeling space for a very long time.

Charlie Bess
EDS' Next Big Thing Blog