"ocaml_beginners"::[] OCaml and multi-core processors

Hi,

After a careful evaluation process, candidate languages for a
proposed financial markets analysis programming project have been
narrowed down to a very short list that includes OCaml. Many computer
languages were considered in selecting the best fit, and OCaml appears
to be have the most optimal combination of necessary qualities and
features; however, with one important exception: no threading
capability, as the executables compiled in OCaml are *non* re-entrant
in the x86 architecture.

Upon reading into development history of the language, it became
apparent that some of the team in charge of design, deliberately
avoided enabling this feature. While I am not a fan of Intel, and
agreed with the viewpoint that Hyper-threading was virtual
'smoke-and-mirrors' in many respects, the effect at this point, today,
has been to become left out of the current trend of advancement of
processing power through increasing CPU core counts rather than
increasing processor clock speeds.

This one problem has completely impeded adoption of OCaml as the
development language of choice for this project. Much as I have often
loathed the actions of Microsoft in our industry, their "F#" variant
*does* allow re-entrant code. What are the designers and development
personnel at INRIA involved in the OCaml project, doing to address
this issue? Ours cannot be the only endeavor with such considerations.

Thank you for your time and consideration in answering about this
concern.

Sincerely,

Eric Berend

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.

Hi,

I believe I have good news for you. The Ocaml team is very aware of
the issue but because they have said that concurrent GC is out of
question for now and have not even expressed interest for STM, both
topics being regularly brought up on the Ocaml lists, people jump to
wrong conclusions like the following comments on this thread from
known Ocaml lists addicts
"I don't believe the guys at INRIA are addressing the parallelism of
OCaml"
"Until someone discovers a way to do parallel garbage collection for
free, and a suitable way to write threaded code sensibly is also
discovered (mutexes and shared memory is _not_ a sane way to write
code), INRIA have made it quite clear they're not interested."

The reality is that the Ocaml developers don't discuss their roadmap
EVER (easy to understand why) which leaves us with browsing CVS as the
only way to infer their plans by looking at their activity. And the
CVS logs reveal they are working very actively to come up with a
distributed/concurrent evolution of Ocaml. Now to the good news:

1) The language is called OcamlP3l (actually it's the second
incarnation of it, having been re(de)fined and rewritten entirely)
2) It's a FANTASTIC answer to the distribution/concurrency problem
3) It's already totally usable (well at least testable, let's wait for
the Ocaml team to let us know when they themselves consider it usable).

You can download it here http://ocamlp3l.inria.fr

I urge everyone on this thread to read the manual's introduction here:
http://ocamlp3l.inria.fr/UserManual.htm#htoc1 in the hope it will blow
your mind as much as it did mine.

And it's beyond fun to try ))

--- In ocaml_beginners%40yahoogroups.com">ocaml_beginnersyahoogroups.com, "Eric Berend"
<tradewisdom...> wrote:
&gt;
> Hi,
>
> After a careful evaluation process, candidate languages for a
> proposed financial markets analysis programming project have been
>; narrowed down to a very short list that includes OCaml. Many computer
> languages were considered in selecting the best fit, and OCaml appears
> to be have the most optimal combination of necessary qualities and
> features; however, with one important exception: no threading
> capability, as the executables compiled in OCaml are *non* re-entrant
> in the x86 architecture.
>
> Upon reading into development history of the language, it became
&gt; apparent that some of the team in charge of design, deliberately
> avoided enabling this feature. While I am not a fan of Intel, and
> agreed with the viewpoint that Hyper-threading was virtual
> 'smoke-and-mirrors' in many respects, the effect at this point, today,
&gt; has been to become left out of the current trend of advancement of
> processing power through increasing CPU core counts rather than
>; increasing processor clock speeds.
>
> This one problem has completely impeded adoption of OCaml as the
> development language of choice for this project. Much as I have often
&gt; loathed the actions of Microsoft in our industry, their "F#&quot; variant
> *does* allow re-entrant code. What are the designers and development
> personnel at INRIA involved in the OCaml project, doing to address
> this issue? Ours cannot be the only endeavor with such considerations.
>;
> Thank you for your time and consideration in answering about this
>; concern.
>
>
> Sincerely,
>
> Eric Berend
&gt;

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