>I kind-of understand that... Borland tried to encapsulate the whole threading thing in a TThread class. It made it easier and every bit helps! I simply thought I should >mention it here, so that FPC developers know about this new API. I haven't had a look at their API docs yet, but thought if they come up with some neat idea not done >before, maybe FPC could borrow some of those ideas..... Piggy-back on Microsoft's research findings. >Regards, > - Graeme -
Hello, If someone is truly interested in parallel computing - "lock free" datstructures are what realy counts - We program multithreades servercode with pthreads, NPTL threads, windows threads now for around 6 years - (- and programm in assembler, c, c++, delphi, freepascal since 21 Years (PDP 11,C64,C167,ARM uC,8051 uC,PIC uC,Amiga,x86) - in all that time object pascal was the most effective language in terms of error probability and turn around times ...) It is a immense hassle to debug parallel problems like deadlocks, priority inversion and the like. So for really cooperative porgramms the design phase on paper should be taken into account even more. The best solution for this problems by now is IMHO the lock free paradigm - but has to be judged on the problem. Several doctoral thesis, research findings, and papers for this exist - if someone is interested - join the ACM, and the ACM Digital Library (http://www.acm.org/) - and the technique is industry recogniced - you maybe don't know FirmOS - (my firm) but you maybe know "Xen" (a cambridge project) which is now owned by Citrix, or you maybe know "Half Life 2" from Valve (which was computer game of the year, i think in 2006) - they uses this techniques extensively. (The Xen project, is IMHO the first project which uses this technique practical and with immense success) For Java and a were short primer/starting point read here: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-jtp11234/ Also "Open-MPI" sounds very interesting. But i fear a "no brain solution API" for developers does not exist - and without digging deeper into the problems of that field someone would have many hours of time searching bloody phenomenons and bugs .... So my personal findings are - nearly every technique "Microsoft" invented, buyed or acquired was cancelled some years later just to bind the customers by inventing something revolutionary new, so a good stomach decision is not to bind yourself too thight to this firm - (Access Runtime for Developers, WinG, DirectX Hardware support for sound cards, the QoS Api (different for W2000, XP and Vista) are all examples where i personally got a bloody nose running into a wall :-( I hope i could share some experience, helmut _______________________________________________ fpc-devel maillist - fpc-devel@lists.freepascal.org http://lists.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/fpc-devel
