Re: Fwd: [Caml-list] Faking concurrency using Unix forks and pipes

[Erik de Castro Lopo <mle+ocaml@mega-nerd.com>]

Jonathan Bryant wrote:

> What I've always done to get around this is fork a process at the  
> very beginning of the code, and whenever I need to fork a process  
> later, I fork one from that process.  That way almost nothing is in  
> the heap.

Yep, that works. Its also probably something that could be built 
into the JoCaml extension.

>  I do have worries about the efficiency of this though:  
> when marshaling a closure across a socket to another process, it  
> must marshal all the necessary state as well.  I would imagine this  
> has the potential to get slow if there was much state to marshal  
> (i.e., a closure marshaled referencing a large data structure).

This is a potential problem. This is like so many language features
that if misused, can lead to huge performance degradations. Knowing
about the problem beforehand allows programmers to avoid it.

Erik
-- 
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Erik de Castro Lopo
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