Re: [Caml-list] exene and ocaml ?

[Ville-Pertti Keinonen <will@exomi.com>]

In case this was referring to my comment in an earlier message in the 
thread...

On Apr 11, 2004, at 9:46 AM, briand@aracnet.com wrote:

> What does worry me is your comment about garbage collection and
> threads.  Are ocaml threads not properly GC'ed ?

They aren't automatically collected in that they exist until they're 
destroyed or exit...but this is normal for mainstream, heavyweight 
threading systems.  I count OCaml virtual machine threads as 
heavyweight, as well, even though they are lightweight to create, as 
they have scalability problems (O(n) scheduling - counting all threads, 
regardless of state).

I mentioned garbage collection as an example of a specific issue that 
would arise in porting eXene to OCaml.

OCaml/POSIX/Java etc. threads are, in a sense, a different kind of 
programming tool compared to Oz/CML threads or Erlang processes (note 
that Erlang processes are also not garbage collected when unreachable, 
which is even worse in Erlang than other languages, as they are often 
the only way of encapsulating state).  The former kinds of threads are 
suitable for explicit parallelism (e.g. to take advantage of SMP), but 
poorly suited for concurrency as a conceptual programming abstraction 
(it'll work, but not scale well).

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