On 10/18/07, Ralph Johnson <johnson at cs.uiuc.edu> wrote:
>
> On 10/17/07, Steve Wart <steve.wart at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I don't know if mapping Smalltalk processes to native threads is the way
> to
> > go, given the pain I've seen in the Java and C# space.
>
> Shared-memory parallelism has always been difficult.  People claimed
> it was the language, the environment, or they needed better training.
> They always thought that with one more thing, they could "fix"
> shared-memory parallelism and make it usable.  But Java has done a
> good job with providiing reasonable language primitives.  There has
> been a lot of work on making threads efficient, and plenty of people
> have learned to write mutli-threaded Java.  But it is still way too
> hard.
>
> I think that shared-memory parallism, with explicit synchronization,
> is a bad idea.  Transactional memory might be a solution, but it
> eliminates explicit synchronization.  I think the most likely solution
> is to avoid shared memory altogether, and go with message passing.
> Erlang is a perfect example of this.  We could take this approach in
> Smalltalk by making minimal images like Spoon, making images that are
> designed to be used by other images (angain, like Spoon), and then
> implementing our systms as hundreds or thousands of separate images.
> Image startup would have to be very fast.  I think that this is more
> likely to be useful than rewriting garbage collectors to support
> parallelism.
>
> -Ralph Johnson


+1 although the possibilities appear seriously constrained by having the
cart(hw) before the horse(sw):

 People who are really serious about software should make their own
hardware.
Alan Kay @ Creative Think Seminar
1982<http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Creative_Think.txt>

There may indeed be ingenious ways for a chemist to make ice cubes suitable
for doing laundry, but having a supply of liquid water will generally be a
more fruitful approach<http://www.rhythmeering.com/2007/06/18/water-and-ice/>.
The experiences of many decades seem to indicate that these issues just
won't go away. What will it take to get the Squeak/Croquet/Smalltalk
community to commit to an evolutionary path through things like Spoon and
Plurion that lead to disruptive innovation?

Laurence
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