Re: [Caml-list] OC4MC : OCaml for Multicore architectures

[Jon Harrop <jon@ffconsultancy.com>]

On Thursday 24 September 2009 17:49:33 Richard Jones wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 24, 2009 at 02:09:56PM +0100, Jon Harrop wrote:
> > Fair enough. I think this is the single most important development OCaml
> > has seen since its inception so I would personally drop OCaml in favor of
> > oc4mc even if it meant reverting to 3.10.2.
>
> I think 'personally' is the key word there. You forget that people 
> are quite happily programming in very slow languages like Perl,
> Python, Ruby and Visual Basic,

Visual Basic has been a *lot* faster than OCaml for several years now, not 
least because it makes efficient multicore programming easy. Even Python is 
beating OCaml on benchmarks now:

http://flyingfrogblog.blogspot.com/2009/04/f-vs-ocaml-vs-haskell-hash-table.html

Even if that were not the case, the idea of cherry picking interpreted 
scripting languages to compete with because OCaml has fallen so far behind 
mainstream languages (let alone modern languages) is embarrassing. What's 
next, OCaml vs Bash for your high performance needs?

> and those people vastly outnumber the ones using F#, Haskell, OCaml, SML
> etc.  (They don't even have static safety, dammit!).

If you want to draw aspirations based upon popularity, look at the most 
popular languages: Java and C#. They are far more popular than OCaml for many 
reasons but parallel threads to make efficient multicore programming easy is 
a big one.

-- 
Dr Jon Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy Ltd.
http://www.ffconsultancy.com/?e