3 ms·

This time is different ;) Look at the end of the GP link on multi-core Ocaml progress report: everything under the "OCaml" title is work on the upstream compile

by yaantc 6y ago

This time is different ;) Look at the end of the GP link on multi-core Ocaml progress report: everything under the "OCaml" title is work on the upstream compiler. It's still limited, but the upstreaming process has started.

ghostwriter 6y ago
Having an SMP compiler/runtime is half of the story, the other half is safe parallelism. I expect another decade is going to be spent on chasing bugs due to mutable data escape hatches in OCaml world.
- pdimitar 6y ago
  This is my main worry about Multicore OCaml. You nailed it. There's a lot of legacy in the ecosystem -- which is not a bad thing at all! Many people appreciate stable environments and learn to circumvent their problems. All completely fine and we all do it. But I worry that by chasing backwards compatibility and not just saying "guys, you need to modernise your libraries to do X and Y, otherwise you will never be Multicore OCaml-friendly" the maintainers will invite a lot of legacy cruft -- which will now be subtly broken -- that they will either have to fix themselves or just concede that it's impossible. Then again, I suppose they don't want the Python 2 vs. Python 3 split (or Perl 5 vs. Perl 6 / Raiku; EDIT: It's actually "Raku" as a commenter below clarified). But I fear it will happen anyway due to the reasons above. I very quickly fell in love with OCaml but eventually settled at Rust for these, and a few other reasons. It's an otherwise excellent language and has one of the most underrated compilers on the planet. It's a shame that it's moving so slowly... :( EDIT: As for safe parallelism, here's what one of the maintainers said soon ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22735176 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22735176 It looks like they prefer to do the lowest level possible so people can build their own abstractions on top. Completely fair though, not criticising.
  - lizmat 6y ago
    It's actually called Raku (https://raku.org https://raku.org using the #rakulang tag on social media), not Raiku.
    - pdimitar 6y ago
      Whoops. I was sure I got it wrong. Thanks.

by yaantc 6y ago

ghostwriter 6y ago

Having an SMP compiler/runtime is half of the story, the other half is safe parallelism. I expect another decade is going to be spent on chasing bugs due to mutable data escape hatches in OCaml world.

pdimitar 6y ago
This is my main worry about Multicore OCaml. You nailed it. There's a lot of legacy in the ecosystem -- which is not a bad thing at all! Many people appreciate stable environments and learn to circumvent their problems. All completely fine and we all do it. But I worry that by chasing backwards compatibility and not just saying "guys, you need to modernise your libraries to do X and Y, otherwise you will never be Multicore OCaml-friendly" the maintainers will invite a lot of legacy cruft -- which will now be subtly broken -- that they will either have to fix themselves or just concede that it's impossible. Then again, I suppose they don't want the Python 2 vs. Python 3 split (or Perl 5 vs. Perl 6 / Raiku; EDIT: It's actually "Raku" as a commenter below clarified). But I fear it will happen anyway due to the reasons above. I very quickly fell in love with OCaml but eventually settled at Rust for these, and a few other reasons. It's an otherwise excellent language and has one of the most underrated compilers on the planet. It's a shame that it's moving so slowly... :( EDIT: As for safe parallelism, here's what one of the maintainers said soon ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22735176 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22735176 It looks like they prefer to do the lowest level possible so people can build their own abstractions on top. Completely fair though, not criticising.
- lizmat 6y ago
  It's actually called Raku (https://raku.org https://raku.org using the #rakulang tag on social media), not Raiku.
  - pdimitar 6y ago
    Whoops. I was sure I got it wrong. Thanks.