[chuck-users] Parallel Shreds

Ge Wang ge at ccrma.Stanford.EDU
Thu Jan 29 00:50:54 EST 2009


Greetings!

> Are there any efforts being made to make the VM parallel (or as you 
> might say, concurrent)?  It seems like that's the future of programming 
> models, and seeing as ChucK is hardly a lightweight in computing 
> resources....   or is garbage collection a higher priority for the dev 
> team?

We are certainly interested in taking advantage of many-core CPU's, but 
no current effort is yet being made.  I think this challenge is there for 
many, if not most, systems today.  Perhaps new low-level programming 
paradigms (e.g., for imperative languages at the C/C++/assembler level) 
have to be deployed before these systems can truly be parallelized.

For example, Apple's next OS X release, "Snow Leopard", will apparently 
offer concurrent language primitives ("blocks") which the kernel can then 
efficiently farm out to cores - additionally the OS abstracts the number 
of actual cores so programmers don't always need to take this into 
account.  Not sure yet how well things like this will work in practice, 
but this seems like a start.

In short, it's hard problem, and I think for many systems, it may need 
to be addressed in the form of new language primitives + OS support.

Ge!


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