Daniel Andor wrote:

On Jan 8, 2008 9:56 AM, Jon Harrop <jon@ffconsultancy.com> wrote:

Is it possible to compute in parallel using separate threads rather than
separate processes in OCaml, i.e. having multiple threads sharing multiple
independent GCs?


I often wonder about that myself.  I'd like to do very simple OpenMP
style multi-threaded processing.  OcamlP3 is promising, although it is
much more heavyweight.

Does Xavier's "standard lecture on parallelism" still apply?:
  http://caml.inria.fr/pub/ml-archives/caml-list/2002/11/64c14acb90cb14bedb2cacb73338fb15.en.html

D.

Actually, something that might be nice to see, now that the flat page table has been replaced with a heap that can handle disjoint heap spaces, is to allow multiple different Ocaml runtimes to be running in seperate threads in the same process.
The heaps wouldn't be able to see each other, but they'd be able to communicate via light weight (and strongly typed) message passing, and you wouldn't have to dink around with sockets, pipes, MPI, or simiar "heavy weight" solutions, so it'd be simpler, and possibly faster. This is not unlike the Erlang model, in fact.

Brian