OpenEuphoria

Re: Important question to all Euphoria users

• Posted by Matt Lewis <matthewwalkerlewis at gmail.com> Nov 14, 2005
• 577 views

Vincent wrote:
> 
> Al Getz wrote:
> > 
> > As to what/how/where/why Euphoria might support that in the future...
> > im sure if the need rises Rob will consider adding something to manage
> > separate cores, as he did with multitasking recently when a number of
> > people suddenly became interested.
> > Maybe he'd be nice enough to reply to this thread to shed some light
> > on this subject...
> 
> That is the problem... cooperative tasking is not going to help with this
> situation.
> The only way we effectively utilize multi-core processors, is by developing
> multi-threaded software. The only way we can do that is if thread-safety was
> implemented.
> 
> This is where Rob's point comes in. Programming with multiple threads is quite
> challenging worrying about when to set up mutex locks, race conditions, etc.
> It's also a problem implementing implementing thread-safety in the first
> place.
> But if want to keep Euphoria beating, this surely must be addressed. Rob is
> implementing cooperative tasking; but is that a waste of time? A layer of
> abstraction
> could be developed to ease the programmer from the challenges of thread
> programming.
> 
> Figure a CPU had 20 cores... Euphoria would only be able to utilize 1 of them
> per execution. That is 1/20 of the CPU's throughput, thus a much greater
> amount
> of effiecency and performance is possible using multiple threads.
> 

Threads may be the answer, at least in some cases.  However, as of right
now, I don't think anyone has really 'solved' this problem.  Also, 
different operating systems may lead to different optimal solutions.  For 
instance, comparing Windows to most *nix variants, Windows has lighter 
weight threads, while a *nix usually has much lighter weight processes.

So the answer could be to figure out how to coordinate different processes
rather than threads.  Neither case is simple.

Matt Lewis