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From: "Jon Harrop" <jon@ffconsultancy.com>
To: "'Fabrice Le Fessant'" <Fabrice.Le_fessant@inria.fr>, <caml-list@inria.fr>
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Subject: RE: [Caml-list] Efficient OCaml multicore -- roadmap?

Fabrice wrote:
> On 04/21/2011 01:23 AM, Jon Harrop wrote:
> > The OCaml team at INRIA are not motivated to do this because it does
> > not constitute research, would probably make Coq slower and would
> > burden them with maintaining irrelevant features.
> 
> You think the programmers in the world that are only interested in
floating-point
> intensive computations, with fine-grain concurrency, are a huge majority.

That is neither true nor relevant.

> > OCaml users just migrate to other languages that are closer to what
> > they want rather than spending years learning how to build a parallel
> > OCaml, then doing it and then building a community around it. The only
> > notable exception might be Jane St. Capital because they have the
> > resources and a vested interest in performance. There are other large
> > companies invested in OCaml, like Citrix, but they aren't so interested
in
> parallelism.
> 
> That's probably the reason why so many scientists use Python instead of
OCaml,
> because it is faster with better multicore support ?  I always thought
Python was
> slower than OCaml, and had no multicore support...

Scientists in academia use Python because it is a cheap and easy way to
invoke existing solutions generally written in low-level languages like C,
C++ and Fortran. While there is certainly merit in such utility it is hardly
relevant to this discussion.

Cheers,
Jon.