[gambit-list] Gambit-C and multi-core devices

Alex Queiroz asandroq at gmail.com
Tue Jul 5 16:02:54 EDT 2011


Hallo,

On Mon, Jul 4, 2011 at 5:38 PM, Hendrik Boom <hendrik at topoi.pooq.com> wrote:
>
> It might be possible to have gambit-generated C code live on top of part
> of the Modula 3 run-time system.  Or learn how they do it all in detail
> and reimplement some of that stuff for Gambit.  Or maybe have a
> gambit-modula3?
>

     The GHC's runtime system seems to have a pretty nice support for
multithreading. They are able to schedule N green threads over M OS
threads, where the scheduler can move green threads between cores
transparently. Of course they have it easier because Haskell disallow
mutable state, so they don't have to worry about locks.

Erlang's VM avoids locks as well by using shared-nothing threads and
message passing. Maybe a cool solution for Gambit-C would involve the
assimilation of Termite and further work on distributing the
lightweight processes among different cores. Incidentally, there may
be some work already done in that direction, given that for supporting
late binding on Windows modules don't access global variables anyway
and are half-way thread-safe.

Well, so far just a bunch of ideas anyway.

[1] - http://www.haskell.org/~simonmar/multicore-haskell-marlow-qcon2010.pdf

-- 
-alex
http://www.artisancoder.com/



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