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[Rowanas]

Also, from what I understand, Toady (armok be with him) has little multi-threading experience. For him to add multithreading to DF, he would have to delay releases so that he could work on a single, up-to-date version of DF, because every time something changes, that could change how and what things must be threaded.

I could very well be wrong, though. My knowledge of parallel processing is limited at best.

[Gamli]

I found parallel programming very easy.  I wrote a multi-processor 2D fractional Brownian motion algorithm using OpenMP + C++.

Then again I like to do template meta-programming in my sleep so my definition of easy might be unhelpful.  Also I bought Visual Studio Professional in order to do that, which costs over $1,000.

But I assume Dwarf Fortress would benefit the most from distributing fluid dynamics and path-finding in parallel.  Actually distributing boozing-up in parallel too as those lazy hairballs never seem to do anything else anyway.

if ( ! this->findPathTo (_worksite) )
    this->boozeUp();

well, duh. nobody says it's hard when you build a program ground up to be multithreaded. it's the conversion the problem.

Actually conversion would spell certain disaster.  That's like rewriting stable code, which is akin to throwing gold down the toilet.  However, unless he has already done so, offloading linear calculations to the GPU would help accomplish this goal and seamlessly take advantage of multi-core GPU capabilities with little programming overhead.

However, just so I can be extra annoying, after converting my existing algorithm using OpenMP I found myself saying, "that's it?"