From: Peter Suk Date: 2005-04-09T06:57:51+09:00 Subject: Re: Seven new VMs, all in a row On Apr 8, 2005, at 4:43 PM, Bill Kelly wrote: > Interesting. I'd been looking forward to the day > that Ruby supports "real" OS threads with great > anticipation. Sorry to hear there are such negative > performance trade-offs. > > I'm unsure exactly what I'm trying to ask here... > But - did VisualWorks come up with some convenient > way to invoke a DLL call on a separate thread? Yes. > From > the programmer's perspective, I mean. I'm imagining > something like making a DLL call and getting some > object back representing the thread, from which a > return value could eventually be obtained? ... Just > curious. There is something you have to specify when you hook up the DLL, but as I understand it, from the caller's point of view, you just spawn your own process and make a normal call. > Most of my employer's Mac customers have dual processor > systems. Our app is currently C++ and sufficiently > multi-threaded to keep both CPUs busy. I've looked > forward to someday being able to write a multi-threaded > Ruby app that, using real OS threads, ran on both CPUs. > > Anyway - not trying to sound negative... Just was > interested to know there are trade-offs... Yes, the Java folks found this out the hard way. I would recommend load-balancing. But it really depends on what your application is doing and details of the architecture. -- There's neither heaven nor hell, save what we grant ourselves. There's neither fairness nor justice, save what we grant each other.