Re: [Caml-list] Efficient OCaml multicore -- roadmap?

[Martin Jambon <martin.jambon@ens-lyon.org>]

> On 03/25/2011 01:10 PM, Fabrice Le Fessant wrote:
>>   Of course, sharing structured mutable data between threads will not be
>> possible, but actually, it is a good thing if you want to write correct
>> programs ;-)

On 03/25/11 08:44, Hugo Ferreira replied:
> I'll stick to my guns here. It simply makes solving certain problem
> unfeasible. Point in case: I work on machine learning algorithms. I
> use large data-structures that must be processed (altered)
> in order to learn. Because these data-structures are large it become
> impractical to copy this to a process every time I start off a new
> "thread".

The solution would be to use get/set via a message-passing interface.

From my purely speculative perspective, it seems unavoidable that
message-passing happens at some level in order to keep a shared data
structure in sync between a large number of processors. In other words,
any access to a shared data structure requires some physical copy no
matter what the programming language makes it look like.


Martin