Re: threading and multicore on the "free" lisps -- any unified interface similar to CFFI for FFI?

In some ways, I wish I never started this thread, but it did confirm
bordeaux-threads and suggested 2 other approaches to follow up with...

On Apr 29, 10:00 am, Pascal Costanza <p...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
André Thieme wrote:

Your suggestion about judgmental statements confuses me, as only a few
minutes after you wrote that suggestion you told us things in a
different posting that implies judgements, such as that mainstream
languages have problems, or that Clojures design might not be as good
as CLs.

The problem with mainstream languages is exactly that it is assumed that
these mainstream languages are good for all tasks under all
circumstances. That creates a lot of problems, IMHO.

I'm with Pascal on this one -- in some sense, all languages revert
down to machine code, so you ought to be able to do the same thing in
any (theoretically -- I know this is false from a practical/pragmatic
perspective).

But just as there are a range of tools to use, the problems to attack
with parallelism are also varied, to the extent that it is very
difficult to globally optimize the selection of tool which works for a
reasonable range of problems. (data size, bandwidth, memory,
computation unit load, levels of communication between computational
units, etc...).

In my prior work with interactive parallel language constructs (R's
SNOW, which provided the first general use, low-end tool for writing
fairly portable cluster code), we had a wonderful example of naive
implementation of a parallel algorithm driving a 40-fold slow-down
over the serial version. (and the parallelization wasn't obviously
wrong at first, second, or third glance; but required a mildly
sophisticated data-flow analysis).

There is a tool selection stage, but it always needs to be placed into
the constrained context of the problems to be solved.
.

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