std.concurrency wrapper over MPI?

[dsimcha]

On 8/6/2011 5:38 PM, jdrewsen wrote:
> AFAIK David Nadlinger is handling serialization in his GSOC Thrift
> project that he is working on currently.
>
> /Jonas

Good to know, but what flavor?  As I see it there is a three-way 
tradeoff in serialization.  In order of importance for distributed 
parallelism, the qualities are:

1.  Efficiency.  How much does it cost to serialize/unserialize 
something and how much space overhead is there?

2.  Flexibility w.r.t. types:  How many types can be serialized?  How 
faithfully are they reproduced on the other end w.r.t. things like 
pointer/reference/slice aliasing?

3.  Standardization:  How universally understood is the format?  Can it 
be used to send data across different CPU architectures?  Across 
languages?  Is it human readable?  Is it based on some meta-format like XML?

For enterprisey use cases, I think this ordering would probably be 
completely reversed.  For example, in a typical MPI cluster all nodes 
are of the same architecture, so it's usually perfectly reasonable to 
send arrays of primitives as just raw bits.  I imagine this is a 
terrible idea in other contexts that I know less about.