Steven W McDougall wrote:
>
> Does Perl6 support Symmetric MultiProcessing (SMP)?
>
> This is a *huge* issue. It affects everything else that we do with
> threads.
No it isn't. SMP is completely somebody else's problem. We need
a language that worlks right on a single processor. If the hooks we
use happen to make sense implemented into native threads on some
hardware that supports native SMP threads, that's awesome, but we here
are concerned with defining a LCD reference implementation.
SMP is best, in hardware, when it allows you to reduce the number
of context switches your CPU-intensives have to endure, by having
the IO handled by one CPU and the thinking handled by the others,
for instance. As soon as you have enough work that the number of
active jobs > the number of CPUs, multi-cpu threading w/in a
single job hurts your throughput because there is too much bookkeeping.
Thing of (Saint) Ambrose Bierce's observations about efficiency:
If one man with one post hole digger can dig one post hole in one minute,
sixty men with sixty post hole diggers can dig one post hole in one second.
MP works best with large grains. "fully supports SMP to the level allowed
by your operating system and hardware" is a sensible marketing claim, but
nothing here needs to be done to back it up. To quote the AI professor,
"IT'S AN IMPLEMENTATION DETAIL."
--
David Nicol 816.235.1187 [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Does despair.com sell a discordian calendar?
