Thoughts on parallel programming?

[Sean Kelly]

Tobias Pfaff Wrote:

> On 11/11/2010 03:24 AM, jfd wrote:
> > Any thoughts on parallel programming.  I was looking at something about Chapel
> > and X10 languages etc. for parallelism, and it looks interesting.  I know that
> > it is still an area of active research, and it is not yet (far from?) done,
> > but anyone have thoughts on this as future direction?  Thank you.
> 
> Unfortunately I only know about the standard stuff, OpenMP/OpenCL...
> Speaking of which: Are there any attempts to support lightweight 
> multithreading in D, that is, something like OpenMP ?

I've considered backing spawn() calls by fibers multiplexed by a thread pool (receive() calls would cause the fiber to yield) instead of having each call generate a new kernel thread.  The only issue is that TLS (ie. non-shared static storage) is thread-local, not fiber-local.  One idea, however, is to do OSX-style manual TLS inside Fiber, so each fiber would have its own automatic local storage.  Perhaps as an experiment I'll create a new derivative of Fiber that does this and see how it works.