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Date: Fri,  6 Mar 2009 10:47:20 -0800
From: Roman V Shaposhnik <rvs@sun.com>
In-reply-to: <20090303183836.2DE505B2E@mail.bitblocks.com>
To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@9fans.net>
Message-id: <1236365240.16176.2826.camel@work>
References: <138575260903030352s623807d7p5a3075b1f7a591f6@mail.gmail.com>
	<3e1162e60903030719v141b41e9ma5fd98c73d8b0e7c@mail.gmail.com>
	<1236103870.4929.101.camel@goose.sun.com>
	<20090303183836.2DE505B2E@mail.bitblocks.com>
Subject: Re: [9fans] threads vs forks
Topicbox-Message-UUID: b4e5d26a-ead4-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025

Clojure is definitely something that I would like to play
with extensively. Looks very promising from the outset,
so the only question that I have is how does it feel
when used for substantial things.

Thanks,
Roman.

P.S. My belief in it was actually reaffirmed by a raving
endorsement it got from an old LISP community. Those
guys are a bit like 9fans, if you know what I mean ;-)


On Tue, 2009-03-03 at 10:38 -0800, Bakul Shah wrote:
> On Tue, 03 Mar 2009 10:11:10 PST "Roman V. Shaposhnik" <rvs@sun.com>  wrote:
> > On Tue, 2009-03-03 at 07:19 -0800, David Leimbach wrote:
> >
> > > My knowledge on this subject is about 8 or 9 years old, so check with your
> > local Python guru....
> > >
> > >
> > > The last I'd heard about Python's threading is that it was cooperative
> > > only, and that you couldn't get real parallelism out of it.  It serves
> > > as a means to organize your program in a concurrent manner.
> > >
> > >
> > > In other words no two threads run at the same time in Python, even if
> > > you're on a multi-core system, due to something they call a "Global
> > > Interpreter Lock".
> >
> > I believe GIL is as present in Python nowadays as ever. On a related
> > note: does anybody know any sane interpreted languages with a decent
> > threading model to go along? Stackless python is the only thing that
> > I'm familiar with in that department.
>
> Depend on what you mean by "sane interpreted language with a
> decent threading model" and what you want to do with it but
> check out www.clojure.org.  Then there is Erlang.  Its
> wikipedia entry has this to say:
>     Although Erlang was designed to fill a niche and has
>     remained an obscure language for most of its existence,
>     it is experiencing a rapid increase in popularity due to
>     increased demand for concurrent services, inferior models
>     of concurrency in most mainstream programming languages,
>     and its substantial libraries and documentation.[7][8]
>     Well-known applications include Amazon SimpleDB,[9]
>     Yahoo! Delicious,[10] and the Facebook Chat system.[11]
>