On Mon, Mar 23, 2009 at 11:39 AM, Antony Blakey <antony.blakey@gmail.com>wrote:
On 23/03/2009, at 7:37 AM, Michael van der Gulik wrote:
Smalltalk, the language rather than the implementation, already has fantastic support for concurrency. Smalltalkers just don't know how to use it. We don't need to rethink the model, we just need to learn to use what we have.
Mutexes and semaphores are hardly 'fantastic'. The state of the art in support for concurrency is way beyond what Smalltalk provides - locking is both primitive and generally not scalable.
Semaphores _are_ fantastic!! Lock-free algorithms are even cooler. The language lends itself to building up higher abstractions. Take for example Collection and all its subclasses; they're screaming out to have parallelised versions made: c := ConcurrentOrderedCollection new. c do: [ :each | ...this part gets executed in parallel...]. The caveat here is that you need to be careful about side-effects. This is just one example. I have some more rudimentary ideas at: http://gulik.pbwiki.com/Parallel+processing. Oh, and sorry to the Pharo guys for keeping this going. Let us know if you don't want threads like this on your list. Gulik. -- http://gulik.pbwiki.com/