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

[Andrei Formiga <andrei.formiga@gmail.com>]

On Thu, Mar 24, 2011 at 8:13 PM, Fabrice Le Fessant
<Fabrice.Le_fessant@inria.fr> wrote:
> Hi,
>
>  Actually, I had a discussion two weeks ago with Xavier and Damien
> about this issue. There is some kind of agreement that the ocaml way of
> supporting multicore would be to have several runtimes running in the
> same process, in different threads. That way, the GC would still be
> mono-threaded, so almost no speed loss for mono-threaded programs (i.e.
> currently all OCaml programs ;-) ). There would be some kind of "fork"
> function, that would create a new thread running a function in a new
> heap, probably generated by a copy-on-need algorithm. The different
> threads would not share heap memory, but would be allowed to share
> structures outside of their heaps, probably for simple types like
> strings and int/float arrays (or using the Ancient library).
>

This looks very interesting. I know there is a lot of hype around
multicore, and many programs wouldn't benefit from this, but in the
situations where you'd want to use the multiple cores you have, the
solutions available now in OCaml aren't easy to use or very practical.

Besides, although I don't think this is extremely important (it does
have some importance for the language's ecosystem) there is still the
"marketing" side. Saying that the OCaml solution to have programs
taking advantage of multicores is "create multiple processes and
manage them and their communication by yourself" isn't a good answer,
in my mind.

-- 
[]s, Andrei Formiga