Re: not all functional languages lack parallelism

["Ulf Wiger (TN/EAB)" <ulf.wiger@ericsson.com>]

Jon Harrop skrev:
> 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.

There is a vast number of applications where performance
is not about number crunching. OCaml stands a good chance
of expanding into some of them, e.g. if it can grow into
providing better support for concurrency.

> The fact that it scales well on 
> distributed clusters for massively concurrent applications
 > is irrelevant: that has nothing to do with multicore
 > computing.

Who's been talking about distributed clusters?

Erlang does scale on distributed clusters, but the
link I provided was about scaling on multicore.
OCaml could too, but I don't think that insisting on
the use of mutable data structures is the way to go.

This may surprise you, but I don't subscribe to this list
in order to try to convert OCaml programmers to Erlang.
I think Erlang, OCaml and Haskell can benefit from
an exchange of ideas. I will continue to believe that at
least some members of the OCaml community share this view.

BR,
Ulf W