Sylvain Le Gall wrote:
> On 10-07-2008, Gerd Stolpmann <info@gerd-stolpmann.de> wrote:
>> In Ocaml you can exploit multi-core currently only by using
>> multi-processing parallel programs that communicate over message passing
>> (and only on Unix). Actually, it's an excellent language for this style.
> 
> Why only on Unix ?


Rumors (and my remembering of old benchmarks) say than inter-process 
communication -using pipes, fifos, or unix sockets- on recent Unix 
systems (in particular Linux) are significantly faster than the 
equivalent Windows counterpart.

Also, I don't know Windows but it could happen that some system calls in 
Windows useful for communication might be missing in Ocaml (but I really 
don't know; I never coded on Windows).

Besides, who want to code parallel program with Ocaml or Jocaml on non 
Unix plateforms? :-) :-)

And I am not sure that Ocaml has been ported to non-unix free 
software... Does Ocaml runs on Hurd, or Syllable, or EROS?

But don't trust me on all that. I am only familiar with Unix. Ask some 
more knowledgable guy!

(I am still not sure that the current implementation of Ocaml would 
nicely run on a thousand cores machine; and I am not sure that such a 
machine would run the current Linux)


Regards.
-- 
Basile STARYNKEVITCH         http://starynkevitch.net/Basile/
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