2008/12/17 Klaus D. Witzel <klaus.witzel@cobss.ch>:
Hi Alex,
I'm sorry I'm just a frequent reader of the Pharo mailing list, so here's my response by email. Feel free to forward it.
On Wed, 17 Dec 2008 15:11:52 +0100, you wrote:
Hi Igor and Klaus,
Having a description about Hydra will really help promoting your project. Maybe we could continue what I started to write...
The Hydra VM is usable as is and in production, serving heavy used Croquet site, IIRC.
Really? I didn't heard about that. I wouldn't recommend to use it in production before extensively testing the different plugins which has to be changed to work in multiple threads. I can only say, that after few hiccups, i managed to run Qwaq Forums image (networking + graphics + ffi + sound + ... ) . It proves that for main image, things are more or less comparable to original Squeak VM. But there is no such guarantees for multiple images in multiple threads - this requires serious testing before using in production.
Hydra has everything you need for the Multi-core VM of Squeak:
- launch and control multiple .images in native threads - control these threads from the Smalltalk language level - communicate beween .images through channels - any number of related/unrelated .images can be run
What is not done yet (Igor would correct me) is making Hydra available on Mac and Linux(en).
There is initial port on Mac, made by John. Some parts made by Matthew for linux but didn't finished. The main work is to visit all C sources and make them compatible with Hydra. Also , make plugin code be able to work with multiple threads.
In light of recent discussion with Stef about ESUG founding, I would suggest you perhaps consider to make Hydra available for you Mac users.
Cheers, Klaus
P.S. Alex the "rest" of the discussion you recalled above (the paper you suggested) is about a very particular use of Hydra technology, formost for and by enthusiastic VM engineers to be "the first" who get it going. Hydra can do and does well without all that (without the cloning of object subgraphs "baby Hydras" from the running .image): just save an .image file and then start it up in Hydra.
Alexandre
On 17 Dec 2008, at 09:52, Oscar Nierstrasz wrote:
Hi folks,
Has anyone looked at the Qwac Hydra stuff?
http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/2008-February/125719....
There was quite a lot of discussion on squeak-dev ast February, but not much since then.
I would really love to see a multi-core Pharo. If someone has an idea how this could be done, I would be interested to learn more. I think getting Pharo to exploit multi-cores could be a big selling point in the future ...
- on
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-- Best regards, Igor Stasenko AKA sig.