On Mon, 1 Apr 2002, Andreas Raab wrote:
David,
[snip]
I didn't even listen to this grumbling about Apple and Java.
(Me neither, fwiw.)
I was interested in pointing out some of the positive aspects of Squeak
(Me too)
in the area of threads; I was certainly not trying to make anybody else look bad (as if there was any need to ;-)
[Mind you, if I take my measures (which I ran across a variety of ST implementations) if it comes to parallelism Squeak beats the hell out of all existing Smalltalks. Wanna beat VisualWorks by a factor of 100?! Just give it a few thousand threads to deal with ;-]
Have you checked out Smalltalk MT (either of you?).
"""Robust multithreaded implementation: Smalltalk MT is multithreaded from the ground up, with garbage collection running in a separate thread. A process can have any number of threads. This enables the development of scalable applications on Windows NT, and simplifies considerably the design and implementation of applications that use blocking I/O. There are no restrictions on sharing data between threads (other than application-specific synchronization issues). In addition, all Win32 synchronization mechanisms can be used, which enables a non-Smalltalk thread or process to synchronize with a Smalltalk thread. Starting with version 2.5, fibers and asynchronous procedure calls (APC) are also supported. """
I've heard *lots* of praise for them. To my mind, if one is looking for OS thread support in a Smalltalk, here is the place to look first.
Cheers, Bijan Parsia.