It's hard to overstate what a big deal this is (and how much effort went into it). The only mainstream languages with this kind of composable parallelism are Go and Erlang, both of which target writing servers, rather than high-performance computing, and which therefore optimize for I/O throughput rather than CPU throughput.
The only systems which have supported compute-oriented composable parallelism like this are Cilk and TBB, which are both really excellent and successful—and provided major inspiration for this work. However, they both seem to have fallen short of widespread adoption partly due to being non-free (until recently) and also, I suspect, because they are non-standard C/C++ language/compiler extensions, which seem to never catch on that broadly.
This is a brave new world for high-performance technical computing, not just for Julia.
The only systems which have supported compute-oriented composable parallelism like this are Cilk and TBB, which are both really excellent and successful—and provided major inspiration for this work. However, they both seem to have fallen short of widespread adoption partly due to being non-free (until recently) and also, I suspect, because they are non-standard C/C++ language/compiler extensions, which seem to never catch on that broadly.
This is a brave new world for high-performance technical computing, not just for Julia.