Re: [Caml-list] thousands of CPU cores

[Richard Jones <rich@annexia.org>]

On Mon, Jul 14, 2008 at 01:08:23PM +0100, Jon Harrop wrote:
> I believe you are correct. Moreover, I suspect that adding support for OpenMP 
> to OCaml would be difficult because the current OCaml implementation is 
> thread unsafe.

OpenMP isn't your typical library.  It's a set of wierd preprocessor
directives which are added directly into C/C++ code (and I believe
FORTRAN too).  Things like:

  #pragma omp parallel for
  for (i = 0; i < 100; i++)
  {
     a[i] = k * b[i];
  }

The, erm, feature here is that the code still gives the same result
(just more slowly) if the #pragmas are simply ignored.

I recently saw Ulrich Drepper giving a talk about OpenMP and it was
interesting in a 'what are the C programmers smoking nowadays' kind of
way.  The barriers to porting OpenMP to OCaml go far beyond lack or
otherwise of concurrent garbage collection.

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones
Red Hat