Hello all,

Is anyone doing anything (or know of someone who is) with native threading 
in squeak?  As computers begin to rely more and more on a multi-core 
strategy for speed up it is going to become more and more important to 
support native threading.

The squeak we have now could do some things, like having all IO primitives 
be internally async IO (putting the calling squeak thread to sleep until it 
gets the IO back, etc.) so that people writing such code don't need to worry 
about such complexity (assuming it doesn't already do this).

But that is only going to get us so far.  At some point smalltalk will have 
to go true multi-threaded.  Even Java has native threads now, but they chose 
the route to maximum impact to the thread user, i.e. fine grained locking.

I have read an article recently on transactional memory [1] and it seemed to 
me like this might be a great opportunity for smalltalk.  If a VM was 
created for squeak that did native threads with transactional memory then I 
think it might be possible that most (if not all) the code we have in the 
image right now could work about the same (and my belief comes from the fact 
that if we introduce real threading then any state changing operation is 
going to have to be "atomic", so we wouldn't use the keyword as much as they 
do).

Of course I don't personally have time to even do the little projects I 
have, much less something like this.  But I was wondering if anyone had 
heard about a project thinking along these lines, or maybe there is some 
college studying looking for something to base a thesis on. :)

Thanks,
Jason

1. http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/1896

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