Re: [Caml-list] thousands of CPU cores

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

J C wrote:

> As much as I hate to look a gift horse in the mouth, and I think Caml
> has been a great and grossly underappreciated product,

Agreed.

> I need to see
> if writing Caml is a viable code investment for the coming years or
> something like Haskell,

I think Haskell's STM is way overhyped and while it may be a good
solution for small numbers of cores (ie < 8) I am not convinced
it will scale to thousands of cores.

The haskell community also seems to be working towards some other
solutions:

   http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/GHC/Data_Parallel_Haskell

but I don't know enough about these.

> SML,

The life signs on this one are rather weak from what I have
seen.

> F#

Seriously? Being shackled to the .Net platform makes that one
a bit of a non-starter for me.

> Are there plans to make Caml threads OS-native threads,

This doesn't help because there is still a global lock around
the garbage collector. However, I believe that a concurrent
GC is being worked on as part of Jane ST Capital's Ocaml 
Summer of Code.

> or add OpenMP-style primitives,

Not exactly OpenMP, but see

   JoCaml : http://jocaml.inria.fr/
   CoThreads : http://cothreads.sf.net/


HTH,
Erik
-- 
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Erik de Castro Lopo
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"The day Microsoft makes something that doesn't suck is probably the
day they start making vacuum cleaners." -- Ernst Jan Plugge