Hi there, let me answer a few of your questions real quick:
On 05/10/16 20:38, Joseph Garvin wrote: > > What is the state of multithreading in Perl 6 (MoarVM)? > Specifically: > > * Can two threads preempt one another? MoarVM has threads that map to operating system level threads. Rakudo exposes those directly as the Thread object, but normally you'll be using ThreadPoolScheduler, which is provided right from the start in $*SCHEDULER. It will only start operating system threads up to a given parameter. > > * Is there a GIL? (Think I asked around before and the answer is no) There is no GIL. > * Can two threads allocate at the same time? Yes, they can. Each Thread has its own Nursery where allocations happen. > * Does a GC stop all threads? Yes, it does. > * Are there any other common operations, besides allocation, that > trigger > locks? If you mean operations that lock up all threads and prevent them from doing anything, then no. There are a few instance-level data structures that have locks on them, though. > * If allocation triggers a lock, how feasible is it to write in an > > allocation free style? At the moment, it's almost impossible. Normally, you'd be able to use native ints, nums and strings to never allocate stuff while doing maths, but MoarVM isn't yet good at eliminating references, so passing native ints as read-writable to subs (like operators, ++ for example) is currently pessimized in that way. > Hyper operators and junctions and future promises of autothreading > are > great, but without answers to these it's hard to know whether the > threading is or will be actually worth taking advantage of. I've > noticed nobody outside the CLR and the JVM seems to actually > implement real multithreaded GC so I'm a bit skeptical. It seems like > a common implementation stumbling block and a genuinely hard > problem. Multithreaded GCs can be defined along at least two axis: Concurrent (with the program's execution) and Parallel. MoarVM has a parallel GC, which means that each thread does GCing on its own and there's some cross-thread communication. Building a Concurrent GC is a crazy amount of work and is *very* hard to get right, if i understand correctly. > Joe G. > Lastly, here's a presentation by Jonathan on GCs which uses MoarVM's GC as an example: https://www.infoq.com/presentations/terminology-garbage-collector Please feel free to ask more questions - Timo
