Re: not all functional languages lack parallelism

[Jon Harrop <jon@ffconsultancy.com>]

On Friday 09 May 2008 13:33:16 Ulf Wiger wrote:
> Jon Harrop skrev:
> > 1. Lack of Parallelism: Yes, this is already a complete show
> >
>  >    stopper. Exploiting multicores requires a scalable concurrent
>  >    GC and message passing (like JoCaml) is not a substitute.
>  >    Unfortunately, this is now true of all functional languages
>  >    available for Linux, which is why we have now migrated
> >
> >    entirely to Windows and F#.
>
> Dear Jon,
>
> I will keep reminding you that Erlang is a functional language
> (just not a statically typed one). It has very lightweight
> processes, concurrent schedulers on multicore, and per-process
> GC. It scales very well on multicore.

I will keep reminding you at Erlang is not competitively performance for 
CPU-bound computation like number crunching. The fact that it scales well on 
distributed clusters for massively concurrent applications is irrelevant: 
that has nothing to do with multicore computing.

> "Under some pretty extreme loads - around 20,000 open
> mainframe connections - I was blowing up Erlyweb/Yaws.
> As a sanity check, this was when Erlyweb/Yaws was
> consuming ~90% of all 4 CPUs on a dedicated newish
> Dell server running Ubuntu 7.10 server; there was
> probably smoke coming out of the box at the time ;->

If this were relevant to multicore computing, an "extreme load" would 
certainly be 100% CPU usage and not 90%.

-- 
Dr Jon D Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy Ltd.
http://www.ffconsultancy.com/products/?e