Squeak and native threads

stephane ducasse stephane.ducasse at free.fr
Sun Jan 7 19:02:31 UTC 2007


you can have a look at Actalk (the 1989 paper of JP briot) in a few  
lines of code you get message put in queue and each object having its  
own thread.
I can send you the paper. There is also an implementation maintained  
by serge stinckwich may be of the 1996 paper.

Stef

On 7 janv. 07, at 19:14, Zulq Alam wrote:

> J J wrote:
>> 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).
>
> I don't understand what you mean by 'any state changing operation  
> is going to have to be "atomic", so we wouldn't use the keyword as  
> much as they do'? We would have to use the atomic keyword wherever  
> there is a state change - why is this less for Smalltalk?
>
> I found http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/537 very interesting on this  
> whole subject. I was especially interested in the work on Merlin/ 
> TinySelf where message sending is (as I understand it)  
> asynchronous. I wonder what would be required to spike this in  
> Squeak even if just simulated?
>
> Thanks,
> Zulq.
>
>
>
>




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