Re: [Caml-list] prelude.ml as another standard extension to Pervasives?

["Mikkel Fahnøe Jørgensen" <mikkel@dvide.com>]

2008/12/20 Alexy Khrabrov <deliverable@gmail.com>:

> While we're on the topic of prelude.ml, I wonder how many folks would find
> it very nice to just open Prelude and have all these nice functions readily
> available.

Prelude looks nice, and I certainly do not want to put it down, so
forgive me for my critical questions.

How does Prelude handle Windows support, and would we want library
components that are not cross platform?

The 3pl project is cross platform if I remember correctly (short of
some issues on OS-X that hopefully is corrected or is in CVS).

There is also the Lwt lightweight threads library which is not
multi-core. I'm just wondering of some of these efforts can be
combined to a more homogenous library solution. I believe there are
also other solutions in progress.

Other than that, I wonder if Prelude really is a practical solution as
it stands: without looking deep into it, it seems to be targeting
inner loop concurrency by spawning processes, which is costly. In some
cases this may be fine, such as an easy way to speed up calculating
file signatures, but often you would like to have your N processes in
a pool that you can tap when needed, such as handling web requests.

Of course we can have different libraries for different purposes, but
before including any one such library, I think it would be healthy to
discuss requirements.

Finally, I'm also wondering about how to tap platform specific
concurrency. OS-X 10.6 will be shipping with Grand Central for
concurrent support, and I'm sure there will be, or already are,
similar initiatives on other platforms.

Mikkel