Comment 14 for bug 531973

Fabrice,

Ubuntu dropping MPI is a wrong decision (*) in today's increasingly multicore and parallel world. Even though Actor Model, Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP) and Dataflow are far superior models for structuring parallel applications, and there are the new partitioned global address space (PGAS) languages Chapel, X10 and Fortress, the current de facto standard in the C, C++ and Fortran worlds is MPI and OpenMP. OpenMP is supported as standard in GCC and Boost.MPI is the de facto standard for C++ use of MPI. To drop MPI means that everyone currently using Ubuntu and MPI will have to switch to Debian. If switching from Ubuntu to Debian is what the Ubuntu decision makers want Ubuntu users to do, then this is a good contributing decision.

(*) I orginally wrote "Ubuntu dropping MPI is an insanely stupid move" but that seemed like a serious understatement!