Jan 19, 2007 : Multi-threaded optimization?

At CodeMash today, the keynote was about Microsoft's upcoming LINQ technology that allows you to integrated SQL-ish query language into your .NET code. Or IronPython code. And query native objects (e.g. process) and query XML. Datasources are extensible, and functionality of the query engine is extensible. Pretty cool. I hope an RDF implementation is written, to bring RDF to all the .NET developers. I feel like there is probably a huge chasm between .NET developers and RDF advocates, however.

Update: Hartmut Maennel has developed a RDF driver for LINQ (see his previous two posts, too). After thinking about this more, a SPARQL driver would be better, except that there aren't many SPARQL servers.

One of the nice features about "declarative intent" programming in a query (as opposed to programmatically looping through a list and checking for matches), is that the query engine can do optimizations for you, like leveraging multiple processors/cores (which will be very important in the future, since that is the future of computing hardware). It made me wonder, though, if standard algorithms like Java's Collections algorithms take advantage of multithreading. Does anyone know? I sure hope it does or will soon.