Re: [Caml-list] Smart ways to implement worker threads

[Eray Ozkural <examachine@gmail.com>]

It does encourage me to take a shot at using the Event module.

One of the advantages of object orientation was that event-driven programming and concurrent processes would/could fit well.

Yet years later event driven programming exists mostly as the main loop of GUI libraries and implemented in cumbersome imperative languages. 

It has been suggested that traditional synchronization primitives are deficient. Like with message passing libraries it's too easy to write incorrect code with them (since they assume all programmers must be naive enough to still code in C.). I think it's so much easier to make a buggy implementation in posix threads that I advise against (having to) use it in any language.

In my experience with shared memory programming I found it a better option to write code in openmp. Charm++ like spawn directives aren't too bad either and they fit functional languages. 

I suppose with some compiler help we could have such parallelization; maybe just some camlp4 macros are enough. After all, it's not a bad idea to isolate synchronization in the program and I bet it can be done in a safe way. What would be needed to adapt the openmp idea to ocaml? Assuming we have proper multicore support (lock-free parallel garbage collector, real threads etc.)

Considering that architectural details cannot be so easily ignored on a multicore architecture I wonder how to do this best. Perhaps some way to specify fine-grain parallelism would be more flexible (like fine-grain kernels in cuda) I think architectural details would be important for parallel code optimizations.

We had used a thread/critical region based intermediate program representation for C but I think we could do better with functional  languages, towards a fully implicit parallel PL.

Of course there are various existing approaches to implementing explicit parallelism on top of ocaml. I wonder if the INRIA team would consider adapting those to a shared memory architecture. Short of the high technology we need (implicit parallelism) we can be satisfied with cool functional and architecture agnostic parallelism primitives.

So my wishlist is:

1) low level shared memory programming primitives and lang support
2) high level parallel programming facility that is completely independent of target architecture
3) implicit parallelism that uses an automatic parallelization approach

Cheers,

Eray