Re: [Algorithms] General purpose task parallel threading approach

[Conor S. <bor...@ya...>]

"Other than classroom examples, software is NOT written through
composition of 'general components'. And even in the small subset
of software writing where your statement may hold true, writing
those components was a very small amount of work of the total."

No, every piece of software in a modern language is written through composition of "general components", from the machine code op-codes, up to the language constructs they come from, up to the libraries, patterns and algorithms they're constructed with. Unless you dislike modern conveniences like "arrays" and "for loops", or you feel the need to write binary searches, quicksorts, disk-io and image-decompression routines inline every time you come across the need for them (in a language of silicon, plastic and copper no less!). Those may be small pieces of code, but serialization frameworks, database frameworks and communications frameworks that are used in extremely general ways and can often be much larger than the small pieces of business logic that ties them together. 

Someone writes the middleware and the infrastructure code, the VHDL, the compilers, the drivers, the operating system and the standard libraries, it may not be you or the coder next to you, but I can assure you there is a huge amount of it in the world (have a look on sourceforge at the number of different component libraries relative the number of "application" projects) and it's a lot of work for somebody. Then again, the better general components you have, the less often you need to re-write them (or go looking for them) and the rarer they might seem from the perspective of someone who spends a lot of time solving specific problems with them. 

Cheers,
Conor


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