Hacker News Reader

Comment by zerr | Hacker News Reader

> multicore

what's the state of this nowadays?

> better Windows support

couldn't agree more - they can learn on Go's lessons (the language didn't get much traction until they added Windows support).

View on HN

4.09 (which has just been released) includes a number of changes that are being introduced soley to ease the merging of multicore.

4.10 will also include a recently merged, large change for multicore support: https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/pull/8713

The plan is to land multicore in trunk through a series of smaller chunks such as #8713

> 4.09 (which has just been released) includes a number of changes that are being introduced to ease the introduction of multicore.

Ocaml multicore has been on the tablet since ... pretty much the dawn of time. It's save to call it vaporware or the duke nukem forever of Ocaml.

The perfect is the enemy of the good.

multicore is still getting developed. you can watch the repo at https://github.com/ocaml-multicore/ocaml-multicore

It's been in development for more than 5 years and looks a bit like a boondoggle though, as the goal is not just to remove the GIL and provide "native threads" but

> use algebraic effects to compose concurrency and supports parallelism through domains and incremental GC. Rather than adding a specific multicore scheduler into the runtime system, we’re providing the minimum required toolset in the form of pluggable schedulers.

They're doing lots of great heavy lifting to get effects and handlers into a production language, and I don't think it's fair to write them off like this. Yes, it's hard, but they seem to be making positive progress.

> They're doing lots of great heavy lifting to get effects and handlers into a production language

Sure, but at the end of the day what it means is 5 years into the effort OCaml still as limited threading-wise as it was at the start of the effort. And that is what most users (and non-users) care about in a world where 2/4 is your mobile baseline and where AMD's R3-3300G is expected to be 6/12 for $99.

> boondoggle

Care to elaborate?

Go didn’t get much traction until they added Windows support? I could believe that Go began to take off around the time that Windows support was added, but that seems more of a coincidence than a cause. How many deployments are running on Windows, anyway?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com