[gclist] Re: gclist-digest V3 #84

[David Chase]

At 11:31 AM 6/21/00 -0700, Scott Meyer wrote:
>At 09:09 AM 6/21/00 -0400, Lee Webber wrote:
>>Any implementation can avoid inter-thread pointers if all inter-thread
>>communications have deep-copy semantics.  This is limiting of course (and
>>impossible unless deep-copy is implemented or just mandated), but it solves
>>a lot of problems such as this and it makes trivial extending the system to
>>true distributed processing.

>The unglamorous way of saying this is: "You have just re-invented the
>process."

Yes and no.  OS Interprocess communication is typically quite expensive.
"Processes" enforced by the language need not be nearly so heavyweight.
On the other hand, the vast differences in overhead mean that extension
to distributed processing is hardly "trivial".


David Chase                    --  chase@naturalbridge.com
NaturalBridge Inc              --  http://www.naturalbridge.com
BulletTrain bytecode compiler  --  when you can't wait for performance