On 10/31/07, Jecel Assumpcao Jr <jecel at merlintec.com> wrote:
> I would like to mention some of my previous work in this area:
>
> - tinySelf 1 (1996)
> http://www.lsi.usp.br/~jecel/tiny.html#rel1
>
<snip>
>
> - 64 node Smalltalk machine (1992)
> http://www.lsi.usp.br/~jecel/ms8702.html
>
<snip>
>
> - operating system in an Objective-C like language (1988)
> http://www.lsi.usp.br/~jecel/atos.html (this page has download links but
> the text still hasn't been written)
>
<snip>
>
> -- current model --
>
<snip>
>

This thread is really getting good! :)

> Speaking of hardware, I would like to stress how fantastically slow
> (relatively speaking) main memory is these days. If I have a good
> network connecting processor cores in a single chip then I can probably
> send a message from one to another, get a reply, send a second message
> and get another reply in the time that it takes to read a byte from
> external RAM. So we should start thinking of DDR SDRAM as a really fast
> disk to swap objects to/from and not as a shared memory. We should start
> to take message passing seriously.
>
> -- Jecel

Wonderful point.  I suppose a big part of the problem I have had in
this thread has been not accepting that a lot of people don't realize
the reality of your comment.  I'm not proposing to abandon the
shared-state programming model *only* because it's too hard to program
in.  My *biggest* motivation is the fact that it *wont scale* to
tomorrows systems.

I would just hate to see Squeak put a ton of work in just so we can
run out and announce that we have "real" concurrency, only to find out
that everyone else already discovered it can't scale and moved on.

Smalltalk for me is about being *ahead* of other platforms.  Not decades behind.