[Haskell-cafe] Re: Python's big challenges, Haskell's big advantages?

[Ben Franksen]

Aaron Denney wrote:
> On 2008-09-17, Jonathan Cast <jonathanccast at fastmail.fm> wrote:
>>> In my mind pooling vs new-creation is only relevant to process vs
>>> thread in the performance aspects.
>>
>> Say what?  This discussion is entirely about performance --- does
>> CPython actually have the ability to scale concurrent programs to
>> multiple processors?  The only reason you would ever want to do that is
>> for performance.
> 
> I entered the discussion as which model is a workaround for the other --
> someone said processes were a workaround for the lack of good threading
> in e.g. standard CPython.  I replied that most languages thread support
> can be seen as a workaround for the poor performance of communicating
> processes. (creation in particular is usually cited, but that cost can
> often be reduced by process pools, context switching costs, alas, is
> harder.)
> 
>> Kernel threads /are/ expensive.  Which is why all the cool kids use
>> user-space threads.

You must love Coyotos, then (http://www.coyotos.org/), which (IIRC) allows
just that (via so called 'scheduler activations', see
http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/bershad/Papers/p53-anderson.pdf)

Cheers
Ben