A word of caution on parallelism in general. Not too long ago, someone in CS at an Ivy League school studied the use of parallelism across different uses and applications. The goal was to find out how much the ‘hype’ about parallelism affected people. My recollection is that they found close to 20 projects where professors (in CE, EE, CS, Bio, Econ, etc) told their grad students/PhDs to use parallelism to run programs faster. They checked all of them and for N - 1 or 2, the projects ran faster once the parallelism was removed. Significantly faster.
People routinely underestimate the communication cost that parallelism introduces. ;; - - - A word on futures. As James said, they work as advertised but if you do read the fine print, you need to understand that in Racket, too many operations block futures. This obstacle will require a decent amount of labor on run-time system. Even if we overcame this obstacle, we would soon run into others that people in the 80s and 90s encountered and addressed with various techniques (work stealing load balancing etcetc). We would need to implement all of this to catch up and provide a sufficient degree of convenience for futures. Then it would be *really good thing* for Racket programmers and would even turn into a research project. PRs welcome. -- 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. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
