Theading (was RE: New member, couple of questions :))

>From: "J J" <[email protected]>
>Reply-To: [email protected]
>To: [email protected]
>Subject: New member, couple of questions :)
>Date: Sat, 12 May 2007 08:13:39 +0000
>
>And lastly, I saw that someone requested native thread handling in the
>image.  Personally I feel this is not necessary.  In my opinion the way to
>go is stay green threads, make them preemptive somehow and make a nice way
>to do message passing.  After a question came up in the Squeak mail list I
>gave my overview of concurrency [1] options today.  If Strongtalk goes with
>in-image native threads then you have two options to deal with them:  fine
>grained locking (a la Java) or Software transactional memory.

Also, I should mention, what I find really attractive about the Erlang 
threading model is that their "processes" are so light weight that they can 
run literally thousands of them in a single image (I don't have the numbers 
on hand but someone on LTU claimed 10E5 processes on cheap hardware [1]).

To actually span CPU's one just runs one real image per CPU, each with 
thousands of light weight processes per image, scaling can become quite 
impressive [2].  I find the fact that an Erlang web server was able to smoke 
apache on the high end very encouraging.

I hope for a time when all important services are written in a *high level* 
language instead of a low level one because the business can't risk memory 
exceptions, nor the low scaling of hand-written C/C++ solution.  This is 
what draws me to a high performance Smalltalk implementation. :)

[1]  http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/455 (search for 10E5)
[2]  http://www.sics.se/~joe/apachevsyaws.html

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