Future of Pypy?

[Paul Rubin]

Laura Creighton <lac at openend.se> writes:
> Because one thing we do know is that people who are completely and
> utterly ignorant about whether having multiple cores will improve
> their code still want to use a language that lets them use the
> multiple processors.  If the TM dream of having that just happen,
> seemlessly (again, no promises) is proven to be true, well ....  we
> think that the hordes will suddenly be interested in PyPy.

TM is a useful feature but it's unlikely to be the thing that attracts
"the hordes".  More important is to eliminate the GIL and hopefully have
lightweight (green) threads that can still run on multiple cores, like
in GHC and Erlang.  Having them communicate by mailboxes/queues is
sufficient most of the time, and in Erlang it's the only method allowed
in theory (there are some optimizations taking place behind the scenes).
TM hasn't gotten that much uptake in GHC (one of the earliest HLL
implementations of TM) in part because its performance cost is
significant when there's contention.  I wonder if Clojure programmers
use it more.