Re: [Caml-list] Re: feature priorities (multithreading)

[cashin@cs.uga.edu]

James Leifer <James.Leifer@inria.fr> writes:

...
> What kind of multithreading features do you need?  It would be
> interesting to understand what would be useful in Ocaml, especially
> from people who have worked with Erlang, for example.

Personally, I try to avoid threads because they usually make my
programs less portable and sometimes more complex.  But many people
who do parallelizable computation, like scientific computations
involving matrices, like to increase performance by taking advantage
of SMP architectures.

If the threads in a program only run on one processor, then all you
have is the overhead.  If they run on different processors at the same
time, with access to the same main memory but with independent caches,
then the performance benefits start to compensate for the extra
complexity of multithreading.

-- 
--Ed L Cashin            |   PGP public key:
  ecashin@uga.edu        |   http://noserose.net/e/pgp/

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