

Rob Pike at Google: Concurrency/message passing in Newsqueak [video] - bendotc
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=810232012617965344

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bendotc
One of the interesting things about this to me is how this argues for
Stackless Python (and likely Erlang and others, though I'm not yet well enough
versed in Erlang to say) as a way to think about problems, not just -- or even
primarily -- a solution for getting performance out of increasingly parallel
machines.(1) Over time, it's become increasingly apparent to me how much I
would love green threads (implemented with channels, etc.) in order to write
software the communicates with other processes via blocking network calls.
Being able to write one function that sends requests and receives the results
as a normal function call, rather than writing handlers for each message and
separating the logic out among them, would be a very powerful tool to have,
though I'm sure there are many other places where logically concurrent designs
would be simpler than the more serial designs I often use today.

(1) I know Stackless doesn't actually help with hardware parallelism, outside
of being able to possibly pickle and transfer threadlets between processes,
but a lot of people come to Stackless looking for a solution to this problem.

~~~
akkartik
Can you point at examples? The examples on the standard page are still
standard concurrent programs
([http://code.google.com/p/stacklessexamples/wiki/StacklessExa...](http://code.google.com/p/stacklessexamples/wiki/StacklessExamples)).
I'm sure an example of stackless in, say, indexing text would be most
appreciated.

------
mahmud
NB: Newsqueak != Squeak, the Smalltalk. It's a C-like thing that looks allot
like Pike (the language) and Awk.

