From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.1.3 (2006-06-01) on yquem.inria.fr X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=0.3 required=5.0 tests=AWL autolearn=disabled version=3.1.3 X-Original-To: caml-list@yquem.inria.fr Delivered-To: caml-list@yquem.inria.fr Received: from mail2-relais-roc.national.inria.fr (mail2-relais-roc.national.inria.fr [192.134.164.83]) by yquem.inria.fr (Postfix) with ESMTP id E2B6FBBAF for ; Thu, 24 Sep 2009 22:58:40 +0200 (CEST) X-IronPort-Anti-Spam-Filtered: true X-IronPort-Anti-Spam-Result: ApYBADd6u0rUnwcjkWdsb2JhbACCIZhfAQEBAQcNCgcTBLtxhBwF X-IronPort-AV: E=Sophos;i="4.44,447,1249250400"; d="scan'208";a="33467837" Received: from relay.ptn-ipout01.plus.net ([212.159.7.35]) by mail2-smtp-roc.national.inria.fr with ESMTP/TLS/RC4-SHA; 24 Sep 2009 22:58:40 +0200 X-IronPort-Anti-Spam-Filtered: true X-IronPort-Anti-Spam-Result: AvsGADd6u0rUnw4U/2dsb2JhbACCIdUQhBwF Received: from pih-relay08.plus.net ([212.159.14.20]) by relay.ptn-ipout01.plus.net with ESMTP; 24 Sep 2009 21:58:36 +0100 Received: from [87.114.87.187] (helo=leper.local) by pih-relay08.plus.net with esmtp (Exim) id 1MqvOd-00082D-OV for caml-list@yquem.inria.fr; Thu, 24 Sep 2009 21:58:35 +0100 From: Jon Harrop Organization: Flying Frog Consultancy Ltd. To: caml-list@yquem.inria.fr Subject: Re: [Caml-list] OC4MC : OCaml for Multicore architectures Date: Thu, 24 Sep 2009 22:09:50 +0100 User-Agent: KMail/1.9.9 References: <200909241409.56894.jon@ffconsultancy.com> <20090924164933.GA5637@annexia.org> In-Reply-To: <20090924164933.GA5637@annexia.org> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: inline Message-Id: <200909242209.50565.jon@ffconsultancy.com> X-Plusnet-Relay: b832bc75ed2d662e40becbdf109e7c96 X-Spam: no; 0.00; ocaml:01 0100,:01 ocaml:01 vastly:01 haskell:01 2009:98 2009:98 cherry:98 fallen:98 aspirations:98 frog:98 threads:01 sml:01 wrote:01 wrote:01 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