Re: [9fans] "Blocks" in C

[Roman Shaposhnik <rvs@sun.com>]

On Sep 4, 2009, at 2:15 AM, Greg Comeau wrote:
> In article <1251993672.16936.4779.camel@work.SFBay.Sun.COM>,
> Roman V Shaposhnik <rvs@sun.com> wrote:
>> On Thu, 2009-09-03 at 08:44 -0700, David Leimbach wrote:
>>
>>> The blocks aren't interesting at all by themselves, I totally agree
>>> with that.  However what they do to let you write a function inline,
>>> that can be pushed to another function, to be executed on a
>>> concurrent
>>> FIFO, is where the real power comes out.
>>>
>>>
>>> I'm not 100% sure why the heck they did it this way, which is
>>> totally
>>> different from any other version of concurrent programming setup
>>> I've
>>> seen, except maybe that Apple likes to "think different"?
>>
>> It seems that quite a few concurrency frameworks worth the paper
>> their
>> APIs are written on, are converging on this model. The ultimate goal
>> has to do with encapsulation of the computation into idempotent units
>> and describing the topology between those units. That separates the
>> executor from the semantics of computations nicely and has all
>> sorts of
>> bonuses as far as bridging the gap between SMP and distributes
>> systems
>> are concerned.
>>
>> I think the semantics of what needs to be done is well understood.
>> The
>> million dollar question is how to best express such a semantics in
>> what
>> still looks like a programming language.
>>
>> What Apple has done is one way of attacking the problem. Where I
>> sit we
>> explore CPS for doing very similar sort of thing. One point is
>> clear --
>> there no consensus yet.
>
> I don't think I follow what you just said

I can explain if there's interest. Perhaps in a different thread.

Thanks,
Roman.

P.S. I've just spent past couple of months working on a prototype of
a parallel framework. I'm not sure I'll be allowed to continue that
work,
so I might as well brag about it here.