Help me use my Dual Core CPU!

[Ramon Diaz-Uriarte]

On 17 Sep 2006 00:55:09 -0700, Paul Rubin
<"http://phr.cx"@nospam.invalid> wrote:
> "Ramon Diaz-Uriarte" <rdiaz02 at gmail.com51> writes:
> > You might also want to check
> > http://www.lindaspaces.com/products/NWS_overview.html52
> > by the guys who "invented" Linda.
>
> Cool, I guess.


I've only played a little bit with it, but it does certainly look
nice. Nick Carriero (from network spaces) also developed a similar
thing for R, the GNU S statistical programming language (also from the
above url), and the demonstration I saw of it was _really_ impressive.


> I looked at these.  Oz/Mozart is a whole nother language, worth
> examining for its ideas, but the implementation is quite slow.

Yes, that is true. On the plus side, though, the "Concepts,
techniques, and models of computer programming" book, by Van Roy and
Haridi, uses Oz/Mozart, so you get a thorough, pedagogical, and
extended ---900 pages--- "tutorial" of it. But the speed and, so far,
limited ways of being friendly to other languages, can be show
stoppers.

> Kamaelia doesn't attempt concurrency at all.  Its main idea is to use
> generators to simulate microthreads.  Candygram is a module that lets
> you write code in Python that's sort of like Erlang code, but it uses
> OS threads for the equivalent of Erlang processes.  That misses the
> point of Erlang pretty badly, which is that processes are extremely
> lightweight (i.e. normally they are microthreads) so you can have
> millions of them active simultaneously (e.g. one for each active
> telephone connected to a big phone switch).

Thanks for the clarification (I had only cursorily looked at them).

>
> Right now I want to check out GHCI (the Glasgow Haskell compiler),
> which may be the closest thing to a "winner":
>
>   - very advanced language, even higher level than Python, once described
>     by somebody as "what Python should have become"
>   - native code compilation
>   - lock-free concurrency using software transactional memory (STM)

Thanks for this. I'll check it out!!

Best,

R.