Re: [Caml-list] OCaml is broken

[Erik Rigtorp <erik@rigtorp.com>]

On Sun, Dec 20, 2009 at 17:18, Gerd Stolpmann <gerd@gerd-stolpmann.de> wrote:
> As you mention order books and soft-realtime, I guess your main concern
> are minimized latencies. Well, you need then a style of parallelism that
> focuses on a certain processing path for a single data item, and where
> the latency is minimized by using several cores. I think ocaml is
> unsuited for this type of task, but please don't call ocaml "broken"

It is actually perfectly suitable for this, as long as you can run
multiple runtimes and share data via low latency message passing. This
is kind of how Erlang does it, with a separate heap for each
lightweight thread (called process in Erlang).

> because of this. Other types of parallelism can be well supported,
> especially when you can accept multi-processing, and when you focus on
> larger processing paths and partitioned data sets.

I agree, but fork() and pipe() has problems.

1. Latency is high ~10µs when tuned on Solaris, substantially higher
>100µs on Linux.
2. Runtimes don't share memory so data has to be copied. This is fine
for small datasets or streaming data, like passing order book updates
around.

Even if I want to process a dataset and partition it and sends the
work to multiple processes there is no framework in OCaml for me to
use.

Erik