I don't think places are a good example for good support of parallelism. It is difficult to get a flexible multi processing implementation done, without hard-coding the lambdas, that run in each place, because we cannot send serializable lambdas (which also are not core, but only exist in the web server package) over channels. That means, that one needs to define ones lambdas ahead of time before even starting a place and sending it the data to process. That means, that we cannot have something like a process pool.
The other problem is, that using places means using multiple Racket VMs, if I remember correctly, which uses some RAM. It is not like places are super lightweight at least. Racket threads run on a single core, I think. I know there is a tutorial about using futures somewhere, where it depends on the number type one uses, whether the code can be automatically run in parallel or not, so there is also some issue there, or at least it did not look to me like one could use futures everywhere and have neat parallelism. When I tried to write a process pool kind of thing (had a lot of help from this mailing list!), which I called work distributor, the above mentioned problems with lambdas caused me to abandon that project, until I can send lambdas over channels. Correct any of the things I wrote above, if they are not true, but I think Racket definitely needs a better multi processing story. I would love to see something like Guile Fibers. Andy Wingo even mentioned in his video, that some of the Racket greats advised him to look at Concurrent ML and that that is where he got some ideas from, when implementing Guile Fibers as a library. Shouldn't Racket then be able to have a similar library? I don't understand how Fibers really works, but that is a thought I had many times, since I heard about the Fibers library. Regards, Zelphir -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Racket Users" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to racket-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/racket-users/59c68f8e-b668-f08e-55ae-a977084f5bb1%40gmail.com.
