Re: [Caml-list] Efficient OCaml multicore -- roadmap?

[Goswin von Brederlow <goswin-v-b@web.de>]

Gerd Stolpmann <info@gerd-stolpmann.de> writes:

> You may be interested then in this pre-announcement I posted yesterday:
>
> http://blog.camlcity.org/blog/multicore1.html
>
> I was able to make good progress on my Netmulticore library, which -
> without changing anything in the compiler or runtime - allows it to
> write multicore-enabled shared memory programs following the
> "multi-runtime" design (which is emulated by forking subprocesses).
>
> More on this later. I'm working on a release.
>
> Gerd

I believe this is a good way to go. In many cases you have only a small
set of shared data (might be huge in bytes but small in structure) and
then you have a ton of purely local (temporary) data each thread creates
while processing. Idealy I would prefer the compiler detecting which
data is local and which shared but I don't think that is easy if even
feasable to get right. So let the user do some work.

A slightly different design could be to still have the local and shared
heap but automaticaly migrate values to the shared heap if and when they
are shared the first time. This would mean dropping the automatic locks
on shared values and have the user take care of locking properly as
needed.

MfG
        Goswin