January 2016 - Pharo-users - lists.pharo.org

Re: [Pharo-users] Pharo and OpenMP

by Ben Coman

On Wed, Jan 27, 2016 at 1:24 AM, Dimitris Chloupis <kilon.alios(a)gmail.com> wrote: > First my apology for the very long post but I think this will interest a lot > of people. > > I have seen that someone out there .... HELOOOOOOO.... has tried Pharo with > OpenMP > > https://pharoweekly.wordpress.com/2015/07/17/pharo-and-openmp/ > > For those that dont know what the hell OpenMP is, it nothing more than a > collection of C pragmas, not very diffirent to our pharo pragmas , that tell > to a compiler how to make code parallel. > > By parallel I don't mean pharo threads which are not really code that > executes at the same time but true hardware threads and taking advantage of > multiple cores etc. A pharo holy grail. > > Parallel coding is a bitch, there a lot of logical problems to face when you > have pieces of code executing at the same time and you have to be aware of > how the hardware is doing it because if you dont it so easy to get code as > slow as running it on a single thread. > > I have been watching youtube tutorials by one of the guys that made OpenMP > and I have to say I am very impressed. And it got me wondering "why the hell > not pharo". The nice thing about OpenMP is that it does not matter that > pharo VM can do only 1 thread which is the main thread, you can do multiple > threads at C side using OpenMP and then collapse them to one thread and send > the result back to pharo. > > Also note OpenMP is engineered by Intel so its a very serious library and > comes included with most modern compilers and that includes GCC. Visual > Studio and Clang / LLVM > > On the other hand lately I am also researching shared memory, actually its > shared memory that lead me to OpenMP. My idea is basically extending the > live coding enviroment of pharo beyond pharo. > > Its sound a bit crazy but the way I see it from my very small knowledge of C > and shared memory is that right now, pharo live coding evniroment is > isolated from outside world. You can do live coding while inside pharo but > the moment you go outside , say you call a C library , live coding goes out > of the window. This why we need to have session management to manage > resource of calling C libraries to make sure when we reload the image , the > image does not freak out that the live state of the C libraries is gone. I guess you won't avoid session management with this idea of memory mapped C-image, since the external resources provide from the OS like files, display buffers, network buffers & GPU threads would still be destroyed by the OS when Pharo exits. Consider the case of moving your Pharo-image + C-image to another machine. > > This is also why many people push things to the image side. And of course > its much more fun to code in Pharo than C. > > Now bear with me because things are now getting really interesting.... > > what if we could have an image flle for C code ? > > The things is that I am interested into shared memory because I want a very > fast IPC, shared memory is the faster. I want to communicate Pharo with > Blender, that I have accomplished via sockets, I can call python code and > python libraries from pharo. But sockets are expensive in large loops, they > work great for simple communication and much faster than pipes when used > locally but try a large loop and socket will lag. > > Shared memory on the other hand is super fast, it basically it gives a part > of memory that is shared among process that means also different > applications. > > Now how a C image file fits into all this you may ask. > > Its simple. > > The most popular way of shared memory is called "memory mapped file", what > it does is that it takes a file and loads it to memory as it is... sound > familiar ? ;) > > what however is also doing is that it allows you share that part of the > memory with any other application/ process as long as it also tries to load > the file mapped to memory the same way. > > So what that means that we can have a place in memory that is shared between > C code, including C dlls, and Pharo code. That file can act as an image file > because we take that shared memory at any time that has been modified either > by pharo, C or whatever else has access to shared memmory and store it back > to that file. This is functionality that memory mapped files provide called > msync. > > We talk here about a C image that work at least on surface very similarly to > Pharo image. > > Now where OpenMP fits in all this ? > > Since OpenMP is about code that eats processors like peanuts , yes we could > call it from a DLL, but with my approach even if that code crashes we will > be able to restore it back to its live state because of that image format. > All we do is reopen the memory mapped file and restore from it the shared > memory. So we end up with true parallel live C/Pharo code with live state > that and of course live code that is shared between Pharo and pretty much > anything that uses C or python or why not other languages. > > So far I know how to do all of the above, well at least I am learning it > now. > > Now the real challenge, which I have no clue about, is to make a Pharo > parser to C using OpenMP. My thinking is as following. > > Why code in C and OpenMP when you could take something like Slang, which is > basically pharo code that compiles to C, Just to clarify (for myself also if someone likes to correct me) I have gathered the idea that Slang should be thought of less as Smalltalk compiling to C, and more as C with Smalltalk syntax which works well with our usual tools. So compiling Slang to C is "trivial" compared to compiling general Pharo code to C. The trick I guess would be dynamically generating and compiling the C code and then linking it back in. > use pharo code with some pharo pragmas corresponding to > OpenMP pragmas that will allow you to compile Slang > OpenMP to C OpenMP and then compile it to an executable or dll that uses the > shared memory memory mapped file solution. > > Crazy ? realistic ? far fetched ? maybe ? good in theory back in practice? > > Open to your thoughts. I think applying some kind of OpenMP pragma to random parts of the image's code would be quite difficult because it of the interaction with the VM - but if it was restricted to code that ran detached from the image (e.g. in a separate native or on a GPU) then that could be interesting -- but I can't think of how you would marshall parameters and results between them. cheers -ben

Jan. 31, 2016

Re: [Pharo-users] Pharo and OpenMP

by Paul DeBruicker

If it helps - The "original" OpenMP thread is here: http://forum.world.st/NativeBoost-and-OpenMP-td4837865.html David Allouche wrote >> On 26 Jan 2016, at 18:24, Dimitris Chloupis < > kilon.alios@ > > wrote: >> >> First my apology for the very long post but I think this will interest a >> lot of people. > > I found that intriguing. > > I wonder whether the lack of response means: > The message was too long. > Nobody cares. > It's too wrong to respond. > It's too clever to respond. > All of the above. > > Just curiousâ¦ > > PS: Working hard on concision ;-) -- View this message in context: http://forum.world.st/Pharo-and-OpenMP-tp4874277p4874989.html Sent from the Pharo Smalltalk Users mailing list archive at Nabble.com.

Jan. 31, 2016

Windows headless and service

by Torsten Bergmann

Running as Windows Service was possible back in Squeak VM days where Andreas Raab implemented registration into SCM (Service Control Manager). Code should be in Pharo VM too. See also http://forum.world.st/headless-CogVM-on-Windows-td4648336.html Possibly the "-service" may be broken/may not be recognized in Pharo Win VM anymore, havent checked. Bye T.

Jan. 31, 2016

Re: [Pharo-users] Pharo and OpenMP

by Offray Vladimir Luna CÃ¡rdenas

Hi, On 30/01/16 18:26, David Allouche wrote: > >> On 26 Jan 2016, at 18:24, Dimitris Chloupis <kilon.alios(a)gmail.com >> <mailto:kilon.alios@gmail.com>> wrote: >> >> First my apology for the very long post but I think this will >> interest a lot of people. > > I found that intriguing. > > I wonder whether the lack of response means: > > * The message was too long. > * Nobody cares. > * It's too wrong to respond. > * It's too clever to respond. > * All of the above. > > > Just curiousâ¦ > > PS: Working hard on concision ;-) When I have messages without any answer in Pharo communities is almost always related with the first option (message was to long) or another reason is that is still pretty distant in the sense of being theoretical, hypothetical or something like that. What works best is concrete questions about practical issues, usually including code snippets (at least for me), while leaving long/distant stuff for blog post. That was the exploration I made here: http://mutabit.com/offray/static/blog/output/posts/grafoscopio-idea-and-ini… Cheers, Offray

Jan. 30, 2016

Re: [Pharo-users] Pharo and OpenMP

by David Allouche

> On 26 Jan 2016, at 18:24, Dimitris Chloupis <kilon.alios(a)gmail.com> wrote: > > First my apology for the very long post but I think this will interest a lot of people. I found that intriguing. I wonder whether the lack of response means: The message was too long. Nobody cares. It's too wrong to respond. It's too clever to respond. All of the above. Just curiousâ¦ PS: Working hard on concision ;-)

Jan. 30, 2016

Re: [Pharo-users] mini Actor model in two classes and

by stepharo

Hi serge I did not fixed actalk I just hack a minimal one. If I change and fix actalk I will push fixes. Stef Le 29/1/16 07:39, serge.stinckwich(a)gmail.com a Ã©crit : > I didn't try Actalk since a long time ;-) > Did you try on Pharo 5.0 ? > Could you push your modifications on the repo? > > Sent from my iPhone > > On 28 janv. 2016, at 08:40, stepharo <stepharo(a)free.fr > <mailto:stepharo@free.fr>> wrote: > >> thanks I will have a look. >> (now drilling the floor ;) >> >> I was reading the implementation of Actalk (port by serge) >> Serge BTW the subclass of SharedQueue are not working anymore because >> they access to state that does not >> exist. >> >> Stef >> >> >> Le 27/1/16 22:20, Norbert Hartl a Ã©crit : >>> Super simple implementation. I made Andrew Blacks Erlang example run >>> on pharo a while ago if you are interested. >>> >>> http://smalltalkhub.com/#!/~NorbertHartl/Erlang >>> <http://smalltalkhub.com/#%21/%7ENorbertHartl/Erlang> >>> >>> Keep us posted what you learn so we can, too ;) >>> >>> Norbert >>> >>> Am 27.01.2016 um 21:53 schrieb stepharo <stepharo(a)free.fr>: >>> >>>> Hi >>>> >>>> Since long time I wanted to have fun building a mini actor model. >>>> So I did one and I attached the skeleton of a future chapter for >>>> FunWithPharo :) >>>> >>>> Now I will read about futures and the rest. >>>> >>>> may be there is a problem with the compiling behavior. >>>> (see thread learningObject) >>>> >>>> Stef >>>> >>>> <Actalk.pdf> >>

Jan. 30, 2016

Re: [Pharo-users] Problem to open Pharo 50 on Windows

by Stephan Eggermont

On 28-01-16 15:45, Justine STIENNE wrote: > I always have the same problem. When I want to open the image, Pharo is > loading but it never becomes opened. Did you manage to get it to work? The new spur vm cannot open old images, and the old vm cannot open the new images. Though you could change the image format from old to new, it normally is a better idea to just load your code into a fresh image. Another thing is that you also need the sources file. Stephan

Jan. 30, 2016

Re: [Pharo-users] Use cases for methods with optional parameters

by Damien Pollet

On 30 January 2016 at 00:29, David Allouche <david(a)allouche.net> wrote: > What do you mean by "fluid api"? I suppose https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluent_interface An API that enables / encourages chaining messages in one expression. Smalltalk's message cascades and the default of returning self both help with that.

Jan. 29, 2016

Re: [Pharo-users] Use cases for methods with optional parameters

by David Allouche

> On 28 Jan 2016, at 21:55, stepharo <stepharo(a)free.fr> wrote: > Le 25/1/16 09:32, David Allouche a Ã©crit : >> - Morphic >> - Morph >> - addAlarm:*at: >> - addAlarm:*after: >> - startStepping* >> - subMorphNamed:* >> >> - Morphic >> - MenuMorph >> - add:*selector:* >> - addToggle:* >> - addUpdating:* >> >> Some of those might not be simplified by default arguments, and some of those may require run-time default values. At least, they make interesting edge cases. > Tx for the examples. > > we should also use a fluid api and not these lengthly argument tedious list That should probably be for another thread, butâ¦ I am all for avoiding lengthy tedious argument lists that break my limited short term memory. What do you mean by "fluid api"?

Jan. 29, 2016

Windows headless and service

by Robert Kuszinger

Hello Everyone! I'd like to install a Seaside app in Pharo in Windows (Server 2008). I live on linux but now I must put it on Windows. Pharo --help pops up a window with only a fragment of options. Pharo --headless TheFilenameOf.image Won't do anything. I've checked the available books but they mostly talk about mac osx/Linux which is welcome, anyway... Does anyone have experience with pharo (service) on windows? My version is (from readme): *Pharo 4.0 This distribution was built December 07, 2015.* thanks Robert

Jan. 29, 2016