David Barbour wrote:
On Tue, Apr 3, 2012 at 9:46 AM, Miles Fidelman
<[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
And for that matter, driving a car, playing a sport, walking and
chewing gum at the same time :-)
Would this be a Flintstones racecar?
I can think of a lot of single-threaded interfaces that put
people in a universe of pain. It isn't clear to me that
distribution is at fault there. ;)
Come to think of it, tracing flow-of-control through an
object-oriented system REALLY is a universe of pain (consider the
difference between a simulation - say a massively multiplayer game
- where each entity is modeled as an object, with one or two
threads winding their way through every object, 20 times a second;
vs. modeling each entity as a process/actor).
Control flow is a source of much implicit state and accidental
complexity.
A step processing approach at 20Hz isn't all bad, though, since at
least you can understand the behavior of each frame in terms of the
current graph of objects. The only problem with it is that this
technique doesn't scale. There are easily up to 15 orders of magnitude
in update frequency between slow-updating and fast-updating data
structures. Object graphs are similarly heterogeneous in many other
dimensions - trust and security policy, for example.
Hah. You've obviously never been involved in building a CGF simulator
(Computer Generated Forces) - absolute spaghetti code when you have to
have 4 main loops, touch 2000 objects (say 2000 tanks) every simulation
frame. Comparatively trivial if each tank is modeled as a process or
actor and you run asynchronously.
--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra
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