>From: Zulq Alam <me at zulq.net>
>Reply-To: The general-purpose Squeak developers 
>list<squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org>
>To: The general-purpose Squeak developers 
>list<squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org>
>Subject: Re: Squeak and native threads
>Date: Tue, 09 Jan 2007 23:08:25 +0000
>
> > That is one of the great things about STM (software transactional
> > memory); you can compose atomic operations transparently.
>
>Agreed but I'm not convinced it fits from a human perspective. As a 
>concept, message sending is intuitive. The same cannot be said of atomic 
>transactions. I believe the solution for Smalltalk lies in something 
>equally as intuitive and explainable in terms of objects and messages.

Well, it is the method used by RDBMS's that have been popular for quite some 
time, so at least the concept is well covered.  This actually brings 
something out of another recent thread (what are RDBMS's good for?): 
Relational DB's have been doing for years what we are having to do more and 
more now with memory: handle lots of simultaneously connections to a back 
end data store.

But if you prefer message passing, you can have that right now.  If you are 
not sharing state then it isn't really a thread anyway, you may as well run 
a different image and pass messages between them.

Though supporting this idea directly in the language like Erlang lets you 
create processes very quickly and many more then you normally could.

_________________________________________________________________
>From photos to predictions, The MSN Entertainment Guide to Golden Globes has 
it all. http://tv.msn.com/tv/globes2007/?icid=nctagline1