[Seaside] Questions about seaside and pharo

[Tim Mackinnon]

One thing on-one has mentioned (and this isn’t a smalltalk specific forum) - there are other smalltalks that I think are multi-threaded (I might be wrong though - so other please jump in). While we love Squeak and Pharo for being open source and bit more champions of pushing in new ways - VW, VA and Gemstone are all very viable alternatives if you have a successful application that is hitting the kinds of limits you might be potentially talking about.

I’ve always felt that if successful, the tech can scale in many different ways, and the pleasure of developing in Smalltalk enables much more interesting solutions that avoids the drudgery of npm and webpack/bower or whatever else is the latest build thing.

Tim

> On 14 Jun 2018, at 21:02, Blake McBride <blake1024 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Node is incredibly efficient but it is not efficient because it is single threaded.  It is efficient because of its asynchronous architecture - which is a real pain to code for.  Since Smalltalk doesn't share this architecture, it also doesn't share in its efficiency  (but it's much, much nicer to code for!).
> 
> 
> On Thu, Jun 14, 2018 at 2:02 PM Esteban A. Maringolo <emaringolo at gmail.com <mailto:emaringolo at gmail.com>> wrote:
> On 14/06/2018 15:47, Blake McBride wrote:
> > On Thu, Jun 14, 2018 at 11:19 AM Ramon Leon <ramon.leon at allresnet.com <mailto:ramon.leon at allresnet.com>
> > <mailto:ramon.leon at allresnet.com <mailto:ramon.leon at allresnet.com>>> wrote:
> 
> >      > 1.  Does Pharo support multiple OS/native threads?
> > 
> >     No.  What you do is run multiple processes on the backend and load
> >     balance between them via a proxy. Apache/haproxy, whatever.
> > 
> > 
> > Given the limits of processors (and the speed of light), short of 
> > quantum computers (which are happening), the best scaling choice we have
> > is multi-processing.
> > 
> > Although running multiple processes and a load balancer does work, the
> > world is not moving in that direction.  It is a short-term kludge around
> > the problem.  A multi-threaded aproach allows the OS to manage resources
> > rather then me (or the Squeak VM)  trying to do it on top of the OS. 
> > The OS has more global knowledge of what is happening on the machine.
> 
> One of the most popular (and hence hyped) platforms like node.js is
> single-threaded. And it achieves C10K by doing evented I/O, but if you
> run CPU intensive tasks, then no event will save you from that.
> 
> So not everything goes in the multi-threading realm, actually the only
> thing I see moving in that direction is heavy computation (and to GPU as
> well).
> 
> I agree there is no wheel, but up and downs instead, however these days
> if you take things to extremes the serverless/lambda approach seems to
> be the most single threaded thing you can think of.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> 
> -- 
> Esteban A. Maringolo
> _______________________________________________
> seaside mailing list
> seaside at lists.squeakfoundation.org <mailto:seaside at lists.squeakfoundation.org>
> http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/seaside <http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/seaside>
> _______________________________________________
> seaside mailing list
> seaside at lists.squeakfoundation.org
> http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/seaside

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/seaside/attachments/20180614/6eb72bbe/attachment-0001.html>