Re: [Caml-list] Re: OCaml is broken

[Jon Harrop <jon@ffconsultancy.com>]

On Saturday 19 December 2009 19:38:41 Jeff Shaw wrote:
> My understanding is that since jocaml uses the regular ocaml runtime, it
> is also not multicore enabled.
>
> Haskell is a functional language that has good performance

GHC and the Haskell language itself have serious performance problems.

> that can use multiple processors, but the learning curve is steeper and
> higher. 

And Haskell lacks many of the features OCaml programmers take for granted.

> OCaml is a close relative of Standard ML, so there might be some
> implementation of SML that you like. MLTon might allow multicore use,
> but I'm not sure how mature it is. SML/NJ has a library or language
> extension called Concurrent ML, but I think SML/NJ might not use
> multiple processors.

MLton and SML/NJ are both multicore incapable. The PolyML implementation of 
SML is multicore friendly but last time I looked (many years ago) it was 100x 
slower than OCaml for floating point.

As long as you're looking at OCaml's close relatives with multicore support, 
F# is your only viable option. Soon, HLVM will provide a cross-platform open 
source solution. If you look further you will also find Scala and Clojure.

> Note that if you're not using a lot of threads, you can use Unix.fork to 
> do true multithreaded programming ocaml.

We've discussed the problems with that before. Writing a parallel generic 
quicksort seems to be a good test of a decent multicore capable language 
implementation. Currently, F# is a *long* way ahead of everything open 
source.

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