[Vm-dev] Ideas on cheap multi-threading for Squeak / Pharo ? (from Tim's article)

[tim Rowledge]

Why worry about sharing object space by sharing the same memory space? A gazillion VMs running on a gazillion processors, whether separate chips or share-die cores or most likely a mix of both,  with communication channels between them seems more likely to be effective. Forget trying to coherently garbage collect across many cores etc. Each looks after their own world and in a sense each becomes its own object in something getting a bit closer to some of the ideas Alan originally wrote about regarding cells and messages in a biology sense.

Leave the OS to sort out shared memory on any particular core(s) for executable sharing or even object space sharing. We’d likely want to have VM normally configured with no internal plugins since most would never need to waste space on file or display stuff etc.

It’s 35+ years ago but my last experience in very parallel systems left me convinced that the first thing you do is prioritise the inter-process communication and leave the ‘real work’ as something to do in the machine’s spare time. I had a Meiko Transputer Computing Surface when I was an IBM research fellow around about the time coal beds were being laid down.

tim
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tim Rowledge; tim at rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
Useful random insult:- A prime candidate for natural deselection.