[fpc-devel] Parallel Computing

[Michael Schnell]

> It solves none of the real problems of MT programming.
>
>   
Neither does Pascal. We _can_ always do ASM if we want to :).
>
> I don't care about this then :) IIRC the Mandelbrot benchmark is full of
> vector macro hacking, if they deny then proper thread starting they
> should better spent their time in usefull things.
>   
I don't insist on caring about the Mandelbrot example at all. (As said I 
found that same even is not one of the examples the poster in The German 
Lazarus forum was talking about, as here the C code does not use threads 
either.)
> Several years ago I had a look at OpenMP and I consider it as one of the
> most useless extensions for real world applications. It adds no benefit
> to the real problems of MT programming.
>   
I don't insist on looking at OpenMP either. I did not do any 
investigation on same myself. I just _thought_ that it would be a useful 
thing, as the GCC community has adopted it.

IMHO any technology that enables FPC to compile a loop like (using 
Oxygen syntax):

for parallel i := 0 to 10 do begin
  a[i] := a[i] + b[i];
end;

in a way that it on a multicore processor runs as fast as the 
appropriate GNU C construct:

#pragma ocm_parallel for
for (i=0; i<=10; i++) {
  a[i] = a[i] + b[i];
};

would be fine.

-Michael