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Ocaml parallelism/concurrency story was not that good - but Haskell has just got its fancy new epoll based I/O manager (100000+ lightweight threads) around that

by szemet 7y ago

Ocaml parallelism/concurrency story was not that good - but Haskell has just got its fancy new epoll based I/O manager (100000+ lightweight threads) around that time, with the 7.0.1 release (16 November 2010) They could have even take inspiration, imagine: typed, functional, monadic init files - "systemd: avoid success at all costs" :)

astrobe_ 7y ago
The topic is memory safety, not concurrency support, FWIW. Lua would have been a good candidate: memory safe, coroutine to structure the code in a concurrent-ish way if needed, and you have a configuration file parser for free (just use Lua as the configuration language, it was its very first purpose after all).
masklinn 7y ago
> Ocaml parallelism/concurrency story was not that good I wouldn't expect CPU-bound multithreading to be much of a concern in an init/rc system. And resource thriftiness and predictability would likely be a bigger concern.
the_why_of_y 7y ago
While that would be amusing for sure, systemd's pid 1 is actually single threaded.
ernst_klim 7y ago
>Ocaml parallelism/concurrency story was not that good OCaml concurrency is great, and Lwt [1] would be exactly what systemd need: run daemon and poll the answer concurrently. Ada, C++ and D would have been another great choices. [1] https://github.com/ocsigen/lwt https://github.com/ocsigen/lwt
m4rtink 7y ago
That's nice in theory, but where are all the people who know Ocaml to write it and contribute to it ? I might be clueless but I can't really name any significant projects written in it, which might imply something about the number of people using it and being able to work on and contribute to something as large and important as systemd.
- ernst_klim 7y ago
  >I might be clueless but I can't really name any significant projects written in it From system programming solely: libguestfs, Xen API, liquidsoap, Unison, MirageOS, google drive on fuse, 0install.

by szemet 7y ago

astrobe_ 7y ago

The topic is memory safety, not concurrency support, FWIW. Lua would have been a good candidate: memory safe, coroutine to structure the code in a concurrent-ish way if needed, and you have a configuration file parser for free (just use Lua as the configuration language, it was its very first purpose after all).

masklinn 7y ago

> Ocaml parallelism/concurrency story was not that good I wouldn't expect CPU-bound multithreading to be much of a concern in an init/rc system. And resource thriftiness and predictability would likely be a bigger concern.

the_why_of_y 7y ago

While that would be amusing for sure, systemd's pid 1 is actually single threaded.

ernst_klim 7y ago

>Ocaml parallelism/concurrency story was not that good OCaml concurrency is great, and Lwt [1] would be exactly what systemd need: run daemon and poll the answer concurrently. Ada, C++ and D would have been another great choices. [1] https://github.com/ocsigen/lwt https://github.com/ocsigen/lwt

m4rtink 7y ago

That's nice in theory, but where are all the people who know Ocaml to write it and contribute to it ? I might be clueless but I can't really name any significant projects written in it, which might imply something about the number of people using it and being able to work on and contribute to something as large and important as systemd.

ernst_klim 7y ago
>I might be clueless but I can't really name any significant projects written in it From system programming solely: libguestfs, Xen API, liquidsoap, Unison, MirageOS, google drive on fuse, 0install.