Apple hyping java...

Bijan Parsia bparsia at email.unc.edu
Mon Apr 1 14:02:05 UTC 2002


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.




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