Am Mittwoch, den 09.07.2008, 22:57 -0700 schrieb J C: > I know that Caml team wanted to see if many-core shared-memory systems > were going to stick around before bothering with Caml development that > takes advantage of them. > > Well, it looks like they are here to stay, after all: > > http://news.cnet.com/8301-13924_3-9981760-64.html > > As much as I hate to look a gift horse in the mouth, and I think Caml > has been a great and grossly underappreciated product, I need to see > if writing Caml is a viable code investment for the coming years or > something like Haskell, SML, F# or even Ada will be a better long-term > alternative. > > Are there plans to make Caml threads OS-native threads, or add > OpenMP-style primitives, or otherwise support multiple CPU cores? And > if so, roughly in what time frame?
I wouldn't take this article too seriously. It's just speculation. Actually, the whole multi-core technology is a challenge for software development. You cannot simply take a program that runs well on 4 cores and expect that it scales up to 400. Software must be designed from grounds up differently for such architectures. Just open up your mind to this perspective: It's a big risk for the CPU vendors to haven taken the direction to multi-core. Except for some standard components and some specially-adapted programs multi-core is more or less not exploited today. So these vendors are trying to push the software developers into this direction, and hope they find new ideas for designing multi-core-capable programs. This article is just propaganda for this hidden agenda. It can also happen that multi-core with too many cores turns out as failure - in the sense that the mass market is not ready for it. In Ocaml you can exploit multi-core currently only by using multi-processing parallel programs that communicate over message passing (and only on Unix). Actually, it's an excellent language for this style. I've written (with some other guys) a big distributed system using Ocamlnet's netplex and sunrpc libraries (actually, a search engine..., http://wink.com). Ocaml is an excellent choice because you can quickly develop working programs that run 24/7. In the distributed world stability is quite important. For a quick introduction to the technology I'm talking about, see my blog article here: http://blog.camlcity.org/blog/parallelmm.html Gerd -- ------------------------------------------------------------ Gerd Stolpmann * Viktoriastr. 45 * 64293 Darmstadt * Germany [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.gerd-stolpmann.de Phone: +49-6151-153855 Fax: +49-6151-997714 ------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Caml-list mailing list. Subscription management: http://yquem.inria.fr/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/caml-list Archives: http://caml.inria.fr Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs
