Heh.. then we're 99% done. Except that this last 1% is still could
take years to complete :)
you serious? Making a Smalltalk image thread-safe is that hard?
I can tell you more: there is no business cases for VM(s) which can do
manycore :)
At least, to my perception, there is not much pressure from people
(even on mainstream languages) to leverage this technology.
What market are you talking about? There are lots and lots of customers of certain big database/appliance vendors that would loudly protest had the stuff they bought no inherent support for parallel execution.
I thought it is very close to come into our houses, but no.. it stuck
somewhere on marketplace, buying a better clothes.
And now it's arrived in tablets already. It's your problem if you leave your iPad lying around *outside* your house. ;-)
Implementing VM which enabling massive parallelism is just a
beginning. Then obviously you need do to a lot at language side
to leverage that, in order to really say "yes, our system(s) are aware
of multicore and can scale almost linearly in future".
And do not forget the most important thing: people must be educated to program for parallelism. The computing power is there to be exploited, but programmers need to know how to exploit it. You can't rely on the compiler or VM alone.
Now, given that squeak's code a hugely non-thread-safe, imagine how
many iterations in redesign it would take to make it thread-safe
first, and then make it run in parallel with rest of the stuff.
Is it really *that* hard or is this just FUD?
Best,
Michael