From: Ron M <rm_rails@...>
Date: 2006-07-21T04:27:25+09:00
Subject: Re: Beyond threads? Better concurrency methods?

Daniel Martin wrote:
> "M. Edward (Ed) Borasky" <znmeb@cesmail.net> writes:
>> Strangely enough, I don't recall ever seeing a *real* programming
>> language, to be distinguished from academic ones, that ever handled
>> parallelism in a manner other than as calls to run-time
>> libraries. Ruby already has that.
> 
> Erlang doesn't count?  True, I don't know of anyone using it besides
> Erikson...


A couple other notable projects built with Erlang are
the "Wings 3D" [1,2,3] 3D modeling package and the
"ejabberd" [4] database-backed Jabber server.  Earlier this year
Jabber.org (one of the larger jabber servers with 180K users)
started using the Erlang based server for its own use[5], so
it's a pretty mature product.

Erlang is actually a pretty nice general purpose language; and
indeed was designed to support parallelism without threads[6].

I'd have to say Erlang's an excellent answer to Ed's comment.



To Ed's "real programming language .. that handled parallelism in
a manner to calls other than calls to run-time libraries", doesn't
C with OpenMP also count?

#include <omp.h>
int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
   int i, a[100];
   #pragma omp parallel for
   for (i=0;i<100;i++) a[i]= 2*i;
   return 0;
}

Though admittedly I've only seen OpenMP in academic projects so far.





[1] http://www.wings3d.com/
[2] http://www.wings3d.com/gallery.php
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wings_3D
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ejabberd
[5] http://support.process-one.net/doc/display/NEWS/2006/03/06/Jabber.org+adopts+ejabberd
[6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erlang_programming_language