[gambit-list] Re: Bill Clementson's Blog: Concurrent/Parallel Programming - The Next Generation - Part 2
Marc Feeley
feeley at iro.umontreal.ca
Thu Jan 12 17:21:02 EST 2006
On 12-Jan-06, at 4:32 PM, Bradley Lucier wrote:
> Bill Clementson talks about concurrent "functional" programming in
> his blog, and laments the lack of public progress on Termite:
>
> http://bc.tech.coop/blog/060111.html
Since the Termite paper was presented at the European Scheme and Lisp
workshop a few things have happened:
1) The mailbox mechanism has been integrated into Gambit's thread
model, which improves the performance of messaging in Termite, and
allows "message-passing" programming (between local threads) in the
standard Gambit system. Serialization and deserialization has also
been improved.
2) A "Distributed Computing" example was added to the examples in the
distribution. It shows how to implement a distributed computing
library in about 700 lines of Scheme code (including process
migration, location transparency, and serialization of I/O ports).
3) Guillaume Germain will soon be done with his thesis, and has
written several interesting Termite examples. Stay tuned.
The most difficult aspect of this distributed programming language
research is that there are so many abstraction levels to choose
from. Should Termite be a minimal language on which others can build
their own distributed computing system, or should it provide a large
set of predefined features (such as process migration, location
transparency, etc)? In the spirit of Scheme, Termite aims to be a
small maleable distributed programming language. We're hoping that
it will be the basis for other more specific distributed programming
languages developed here or elsewhere.
Marc
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