On Oct 12, 2010, at 9:22 AM, Damian Conway wrote: > Perhaps we need to think more Perlishly and reframe the entire question. > Not: "What threading model do we need?", but: "What kinds of non-sequential > programming tasks do we want to make easy...and how would we like to be > able to specify those tasks?"
I watched a presentation by Guy Steele at the Strange Loop conference on Thursday where he talked about non-sequential programming. One of the interesting things that he mentioned was to use the algebraic properties of an operation to know when a large grouping of operations can be done non-sequentially. For example, we know that the meta reduction operator could take very large lists and split them into smaller lists across all available cores when performing certain operations, like addition and multiplication. If we could mark new operators that we create with this knowledge we could do this for custom operators too. This isn't a new idea, but it seems like it would be a helpful tool in simplifying non-sequential programming and I didn't see it mentioned in this thread yet. Here are the slides to the talk to which I'm referring: http://strangeloop2010.com/talk/presentation_file/14299/GuySteele-parallel.pdf ~Matt
