[fpc-pascal] Threading vs Parallelism ?

[Lars]

On Wed, March 29, 2017 4:26 pm, fredvs wrote:
> @Karoly Balogh (Charlie/SGR)
>
>
> Perfect, I have now all the arguments to defend the "Dinosaur Threading"
> choice.
>
> Thanks.
>
>
> Fre;D
>

Methinks that programs should be designed or programmed in such an
abstract way that you do not care or know whether multiple processes are
being used, IPV mechanisms, or threads... I.e. you write your program in
such a way that it could take advantage of multi cpus or gpus or whatever,
using anything from threads to actual proceses, and your program is so
high level that you dont care ... Then if you have a performance issue
because the underlying low level details didnt work, there may be some
setting to tweak as a last resort. Kind of like how theoretically you
could use sqldb at a high level without knowing which database
implementation you are using underneath

I think Erlang, and errrrr, golang are trying to look at the problem this
way too. You may also check Rob Pike youtube talk about concurrency. This
is an open area of computing science still being worked on. Also, how
would quantum computers deal with threading and would you even need
threads, or would a single quantum cpu be so powerful that there would be
little need to thread things off separately...

It would be interesting to see if TProcess could be used in fpc, or
assignstream, to mimmick thread programming but instead of threads a
process is used , and you still can program in a thread like way or some
high level way. SimpleIPC comes close but it's more like sending a
message, not calling a procedure as normal. Each pascal procedure or C
function is like a mini program itself, so why couldn't each procedure be
a separate EXE program if you wanted it to be...

In OOP its harder to think this way as an object is many procedures
attached to a struct/record

Another idea is that each unit file could be a separate exe or thread , or
each class/object could be a separate exe and you design the program so
that each object does its own work in a separate exe then communicates
with some other main exe

Likely in order to understand any of these creative ideas, which could be
bad ideas, one will need some THC or good weed