The release of OCaml 4.09.0 is particularly significant for us at OCaml Labs, as it represents a phase shift in our development efforts towards integrating multicore parallelism into the language. For the past few years, we have been implementing multicore as a branch based off released versions of…

This is exciting. Thanks for doing that work!

I am curious, what is missing for the first multicore release? Anything that beyond mentioned changes.

You can try satisfying your curiosity by inspecting the existing 4.06.1+multicore branch and diffing it against ocaml/ocaml#trunk, and then categorising the missing patches from the results of the 3 way diff. Post it here when you generate that list :slight_smile:

Anil help me get hype about multicore. Is it going to have an appreciable performance hit for single-threaded only apps? This is an important sticking point for the grizzled UNIX beards who insist fork is the only true multiprogramming model.

tl;dr maybe less than 10%, but maybe comparing singlecore to multicore runtimes is not that simple hype level: moderate thanks!

The thread linked by @gadmm focuses on integration of the multicore runtime into the main distribution. This feature would remain dormant for a while. There is still some work needed beyond merging existing code. Here are the bits I know of, of course the multicore developers could tell you better. …

Thank you for such a comprehensive answer!

Converging on the representation of closures in bytecode and native code. I’m curious if this might allow native executables being “hot patched” or extended with byte code modules, while sharing one heap!

If we could get both multicore domains (so, like Thread I imagine) and mixed bytecode/native executable, I’d pop champagne bottles like crazy! :joy:

Multicore prerequisite patches appearing in released OCaml compilers now

Ecosystem

gadmm September 25, 2019, 11:38pm 6

This was evoked at the June 2018 meeting: Ocaml-multicore: report on a June 2018 development meeting in Paris

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Multicore prerequisite patches appearing in released OCaml compilers now

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