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desireco42

Just finishing OCaml course at Paris Diderot

www.fun-mooc.fr/login?next=/courses/parisdiderot/56002S02

Really cool language and opened my eyes on how some constructs are being used.

Multicore is definitely must for functional languages.(sorry random thought)

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F# is very similar, and has multicore. Can't compile to native yet though, I don't think.

F# is a bit lower in terms of abstraction capability compared to OCaml though.

It can compile to native via NGEN and Mono, for .NET Native it is WIP.

F# lacks all the most advanced module capabilities of OCaml, is tied to the CLR and isn't free of the Null problem.

Meanwhile it enjoys real multi-core, and has much better IDE support, access to 3D accelerated GUIs and high quality DB drivers and proper Windows supports.

> Multicore is definitely must for functional languages.(sorry random thought)

...why?

May be worth exploring this from the other side too. Why do you think it is ok for a programming language to lock people into to using just 1 core per process?

I think most would agree that multicore capability is desirable, but it's clearly not a "must" as ocaml has been without it all of this time and many have used it to good effect regardless (of course it might be a must to certain people who need it for their use case). Also, the same restriction that prevents multicore in ocaml (the GIL) also affects other languages which are obviously useful, such as Python. So to answer your question it's clearly "ok" since it doesn't prevent people from productively writing effective and useful software in it, although it is of course a restriction which many would like to see go away.

To be fair, the current multiprocess approach that OCaml concurrency libraries use handles the most common concurrency need (concurrent io) just fine. Multicore is most useful for CPU-bound computations.

Definitely not a must, I guess he may be referfing to how immutability and pure functions bring great benefits for writing concurrent programs.

I didn't want to take it away from announcement. I see others are saying it might not be as important.

I believe it to be main attraction of functional languages. We don't want to be stuck on single processor forever and immutability is allowing us to spread wings and utilize processors better.

So that is why I think it is imperative ( :) ) to have this as a feature of functional languages.

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