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Comment by jaekwon | Hacker News Reader

Thanks for this, you've nailed the problem.

I'm looking for a language that can do everything that Node.js does but also solves this control flow problem, but is also fast and has support for OpenCL and beefy math libraries.

I don't find Erlang to be performant in this regard, so I'm looking at Scala but I'm constantly getting pissed.at.java.packages.and.conventions. I think it also suffers from the same problems as Node.js and doesn't support the async/control-flow magic that Haskell supposedly has.

Perhaps I should consider Haskell after all. It's that or C++.

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Take a look at LuaJIT.

I have some early FFI bindings for OpenCL (and OpenGL, glfw) with some simple demos. Not updated recently, but it's done by using stock luajit (take latest), and not writing a binding code at all (just FFI definitions which LuaJIT understands).

You can't do callbacks (yet). That is - you can't rely on "C" function to call you back at lua land. That's why I chose glfw instead of glut or others. There is way to setup your main loop without callbacks.

http://github.com/malkia/luajit-opencl

There is also a coroutine based embedding of Lua/Luajit in nginx if you want to embed into a web server environment (without callbacks). https://github.com/chaoslawful/lua-nginx-module

Perhaps you could try python, numpy, twisted, inline callbacks and one of the python opencl packages.

Inline callbacks are syntactic sugar included recent versions of twisted that make your code look synchronous while still running on the event loop.

With python, you get to use a wealth of libraries, but you need to still be mindful of what is blocking.

Wnen something you need to call is blocking, you can try deferToThread.

Don't worry, you won't need to think too much about race conditions and other concurrency issues with threading since there is the GIL in python. Also, Twisted makes it a cinch.

Good luck!

Haskell (or rather GHC) offers a blocking programming model (e.g. spawn a thread per connection and make blocking reads/writes on the socket) but uses asynchronous I/O in its implementation (one thread uses epoll/kqueue/poll to do the I/O and the CPU bound threads are scheduled on a thread pool).

Maybe, in a couple of years, javascript (or any language like coffescript that compiles to javascript) will fit your needs, especially regarding the control flow problem.

Here's an excerpt of a blog post (http://blog.mozilla.com/dherman/2011/01/30/proper-tail-calls...) from a research engineer at Mozilla Labs who works on the new ECMAScript standard:

  >Having an officially guaranteed tail call mechanism   
  >makes it possible to compile control constructs like 
  >continuations, coroutines, threads, and actors. And, 
  >of course, it’s useful for compiling source languages 
  >with tail calls!

Of course, it is a long way to go until one is able to use these features. So, for now, you are better off to look somewhere else for your specific needs.

You could build the skeleton in Erlang and then call out to Lua. This one works well...

https://github.com/Eonblast/Erlualib

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