Computer Chess Club Archives


Search

Terms

Messages

Subject: Interested in trying out parallel programming?

Author: Dan Andersson

Date: 17:09:36 09/12/05


 If you are toying with the thought of trying it out there are a few decent
sandboxes.

 One is the learning environment Transterpreter. It comes with a customized
JEdit as IDE and allows one to test and debug parallel programs and even embed
them in Lego Mindstorms robots. The language is OCCAM-2, an imperative language
with built in support for Communicating Sequential Processes.

 The second is Erlang/OTP a robust industry strength environment used
successfully in many commercial projects. The default environment isn't as nice
as Transterpreter but there is the option to use the ErlIDE Eclipse plugin.
Erlang is a declarative functional language with inbuilt concurrency.

 Thirdly Mozart/Oz is an option. Oz is a multiparadigm language that features an
orthogonal set of programming models. Declarative, functional, procedural,
stateful, stateless, OO, constraints ... You name it. It also has a truly
excellent book associated with it.  'Concepts, Techniques, and Models of
Computer Programming' is a truly astonishing piece of work that makes you 'grok'
the relations between different models of computation. Uses EMACS as a multi
featured IDE. Allows introspection and manipulation of live variables and other
powerful debugging techniques.

 The last is Alice. An extension of SML that supports constraints, concurrent
and distributed programming. Has a simple straightforward IDE. Like Mozart/Oz it
has a whole slew of interactive debugging options. The JIT compiler for x86-32
is functioning.

 You might ask yourself why not to use a threading library in your favourite
language? The answer is not that you can not, but rather there are severe
restrictions and complications. See for example: 'Threads Cannot be Implemented
as a Library' by Hans-J. Boehm.

Links:
 Transterpreter http://www.transterpreter.org/
 Erlang http://www.erlang.org/
 Mozart/Oz http://www.mozart-oz.org/
 Concepts, Techniques, ... http://www2.info.ucl.ac.be/people/PVR/book.html
 CTM Wiki http://www.codepoetics.com/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page
 Alice http://www.ps.uni-sb.de/alice/
 Threads Cannot ... http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/2004/HPL-2004-209.pdf

MvH Dan Andersson



This page took 0 seconds to execute

Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700

Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.