[fpc-devel] Parallel Computing

[Mark Morgan Lloyd]

Mattias Gaertner wrote:

> Think about the alternative: It is much harder to implement the same
> parallel loop with TThread. So OpenMP makes parallel loops much easier
> to implement. For me this is the 'Delphi' way: Makes things easy and
> readable.

It's also very much a case of user expectation. I know of somebody who's 
writing some number-crunching stuff in VB: I suspect that like me he's aware 
of the parallelisation facilities in FORTRAN but learned to dislike the 
language at university. If we can implement something that has the same 
"shape" as other OpenMP-aware languages people might be interested, if it's 
radically different they won't.

I've taken the liberty of suggesting in 
http://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/Talk:OpenMP_support that a "sequential" 
modifier would be useful as a guard around the parallel procedure. This might 
also be useful for the existing thread model.

-- 
Mark Morgan Lloyd
markMLl .AT. telemetry.co .DOT. uk

[Opinions above are the author's, not those of his employers or colleagues]