On Mon, 2007-02-19 at 10:44 +0100, Ramon Diaz-Uriarte wrote: > On 2/16/07, skaller <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > On Fri, 2007-02-16 at 14:49 +0100, Ramon Diaz-Uriarte wrote: > > > On 2/16/07, skaller <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > It takes time and effort to write good docs -- much less to > > spout off in an email. > Sure. No criticism in my email. There's nothing wrong with criticism, there should be more of it :) Just limited resources .. plus it's more fun writing a compiler than documenting it :) > Now, following with the tradition of "it is sooo easy to ask for > stuff": my superficial understanding is that distributed, concurrent, > and parallel computing using shared memory can be a lot harder and > error prone (e.g., "Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Comp. Progr", > from van Roy and Haridi). If at all possible, when/why/how to choose > Felix over Erlang (or Oz) and how to complement both (your sentence of > "Felix to create ... that Erlang would manage ...") would be something > great to have in the docs. Because it isn't a lot harder, that's crap. Message passing is easier to analyse, but some kinds of things will require much more complex programs. Felix provides two kinds of threading: your ordinary pre-emptive threads and fibres. Both use channels for communication. Channels are actually synchronisation primitives not data pipes, but they can and usually are used for transfering ownership of data. So that's basically message passing.. except the data is in shared address space so it's very fast. Of course you can also use mutexes etc. With fibres this kind of things is rarely needed, since they can't be pre-empted. So the actual model is a variant of CSP plus shared memory. An arbitrary program isn't easy to reason about .. but it is possible to write code which is if you want. Just as an example -- fibres cannot deadlock! Hehe! This is a trick statement. The way the model is built, if fibres deadlock they're unreachable and get reaped by the collector, and so they don't exist, and hence can't be deadlocked. -- John Skaller <skaller at users dot sf dot net> Felix, successor to C++: http://felix.sf.net ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Take Surveys. Earn Cash. Influence the Future of IT Join SourceForge.net's Techsay panel and you'll get the chance to share your opinions on IT & business topics through brief surveys-and earn cash http://www.techsay.com/default.php?page=join.php&p=sourceforge&CID=DEVDEV _______________________________________________ Felix-language mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/felix-language
