Re: Comparison of Lispworks and Allegro CL


Marcin 'Qrczak' Kowalczyk wrote:
"Bill Atkins" <batkins57@xxxxxxxxx> writes:

LispWorks has "true OS multithreading" -- the problem that someone
mentioned here was that it can't take advantage of multi-CPU systems.
They are still real native threads.

Using native threads which don't run in parallel combines the worst
aspects of two choices: threads are as heavy as in native threading,
but they don't use parallelism for efficiency as in green threading.

So why did the developers LispWorks use native threads? What do
you think?

AFAIK it has advantages for calling foreign code. For example other
threads would
still be able to run, when you call and wait in some thread. It
seems that this was more important for their customers, than support
of multiple cpus.

Let me guess, if there is sufficient customer demand (= money),
LispWorks
will have multi-cpu threads in some future version.


(I don't know how LW works, I'm basing on the above descrption.)

--
__("< Marcin Kowalczyk
\__/ qrczak@xxxxxxxxxx
^^ http://qrnik.knm.org.pl/~qrczak/

.