Squeak and Active Objects

Eric Merritt cyberlync at yahoo.com
Wed Mar 5 13:32:05 UTC 2003


Andreas,
  I am going to give it a shot. I think I have the
implementation worked out. The only issue I need to
work out now is the process scheduling issue. Tom
offered some insight there that may help. I may also
go  and hack into process scheduler and see what I can
see.

All in all it should be fun.

Thanks,
Eric 
--- Andreas Raab <andreas.raab at gmx.de> wrote:
> Eric,
> 
> I think you might be positively surprised about
> Squeak's threads. They are
> very lightweight and process switching is extremely
> efficient - according to
> my measures a process switch costs roughly as much
> as four message sends. In
> fact, if you do heavy process switching you will
> find that Squeak's
> dog-simple implementation beats commercial variants
> (such as VisualWorks) by
> factors of ~20. All in all my experience with
> threads in Squeak was
> extremely pleasant so I encourage you to give it a
> try.
> 
> Cheers,
>   - Andreas
> 
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From:
> squeak-dev-bounces at lists.squeakfoundation.org 
> >
>
[mailto:squeak-dev-bounces at lists.squeakfoundation.org]
> On 
> > Behalf Of Eric Merritt
> > Sent: Tuesday, March 04, 2003 11:30 PM
> > To: squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org
> > Subject: Squeak and Active Objects
> > 
> > 
> > Hello All,
> > 
> >  How good is the threading system within squeak? I
> > have quite a few little simulations written in
> Erlang
> > and I thought I would try moving a few to squeak.
> This
> > is for fun more then anything else. 
> > 
> >  I thought that the most interesting way to go
> about
> > this would be to wrap objects up into their own
> > threads, something like Mozart-Oz does with its
> active
> > objects
> >
>
(http://www.mozart-oz.org/documentation/tutorial/node11.html#s
> > ection.objectscc.active)
> > 
> >  <side-note> 
> >    I realize their is nothing to be gained
> performance
> > wise by the use of multiple threads. This is
> > especially true in squeak as it uses VM threads.
> > However, in this context I am using threads as
> another
> > abstraction, nothing more.
> >  </side-note>
> > 
> >  There will probably be a few problems, of course.
> I
> > am not sure how 'light' squeak threads are. In
> Erlang
> > processes cost almost nothing to spin off and the
> > system is designed completely around concurrency.
> I
> > don't expect Squeak to compete with Erlang or
> Mozart
> > in this area, but it would need to support a
> goodly
> > number of concurrent threads.
> >  
> >  I should probably just test this, but I though it
> > would be nice to get the communities input
> > 
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> 
> 


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