Hi
I do not have the expertise but I would like to know how we could improve the thread model of Squeak. I started to look at Mozart which apparently has a good thread model and was wondering if it could be possible to imporve the one of Squeak.
Have you any intention in this direction? Squeak belongs also to the people that improve it ;)
My one reservation is the threads. Squeak (which is both a language and an implementation) is, to my taste, weak there. Java, a language, is usually implemented with crappy threads. My employer/ company (NaturalBridge) did a Java implementation that supports about 30,000 threads, which is "enough" for now, though in my personal opinion clearly still limited. Sun's trying to promote asynchronous I/O (in jdk1.4) instead of cheap threads, which I think is just plain insane on several counts. It is vastly easier to write (something like) a web server or transaction processing engine if the code you are writing is structured as a thread (or two) per transaction. If Squeak has expensive threads (like most Java implementations, not like NaturalBridge's, not like Erlang) it will be somewhat limited for a class of applications where I think it would actually be rather well-suited.
Stef