[eurolisp] http://www.dirkgerrits.com/erlisp/roadmap.html

[Marco Antoniotti]

Hi

since you guys are looking at threading issues,  I would suggest that 
you dig up some of the old EcoLISP threading things by Giuseppe 
Attardi.  I do not know how much of it survives in ECL, but it is worth 
looking up.  If memory does not fail me it had a very much 
continuation-style concurrency model.

Cheers

Marco







On Nov 3, 2004, at 8:17 AM, Hoehle, Joerg-Cyril wrote:

> Dirk wrote:
>> Is it
>> just because threads with shared memory and locking are the best we 
>> can
>> do for parallelism, and because socket and RPC libraries are totally
>> adequate for distributed programming?
>> I think the answer is no.
>
> So do I. Therefore I was disappointed by your roadmap which talks a 
> lot about OS threads and special (thread-local) variables.
> Recently I came again across Lightweight Languages Workshop 2002
> http://ll2.ai.mit.edu/
> You'll notice that Joe Armstrong's web server starts where Apache has 
> already broken down due to too many concurrent users. I you go with OS 
> threads, you'll never get there.
>
> I reread part's of Graham's On Lisp yesterday. There's one section 
> where he mentions that a completely unperformant but working thing is 
> still valuable to start with because it allows experimentation 
> (similar topic idea in the article about the failure of the NIL 
> machine/project).
>
> The reason why I want to depart from OS threads is because I expect 
> different ways of computing arise when "threads" are extremely light 
> weight (as in Erlang or Oz, not in UNIX), like different ways of 
> computing arose when stack space became cheap or when memory became 
> cheap. I.e. these days, many GNU programs allocate a few MB on the 
> stack without shame, and programs long do in memory only what once 
> were expensive disk-bound operations. This allows different algorithms 
> to be used to address problems.
>
> OTOH maybe one can wait until a typical Linux can fork a 300000 
> threads on a 256MB machine (I haven't checked how far StateThreads and 
> the other approaches can go). That's ~1KB per thread!
> Cf. http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?MessagingAsAlternativeToMultiThreading
>
> Regards,
> 	Jörg Höhle.
> PS: I didn't see a comp.lang.lisp thread, nor a wiki/message forum on 
> your site and I still think eurolisp is not the right forum for this.
>
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--
Marco Antoniotti					http://bioinformatics.nyu.edu
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