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I think this is going to turn out to be a killer feature of Ocaml once people get used to the fact that using 8 cores at once isn't that great of a goal when on-demand computing platforms let you scale much much larger.

I think this point isn't made often enough. There certainly are times when scaling within a single machine is useful but, as is more often the case, if you have to scale beyond a single physical instance you might as well plan for process-oriented parallelism up front.



Certainly, but there are circumstances - say high-performance math & data heavy stuff - that benefits greatly from a shared memory implementation.

And the ease of use of multi-process architectures needs to be improved as well.


Note that OCaml is just fine for heavy math and data stuff: the garbage collector has a global lock, but threads work just fine for CPU intensive activities. Just don't generate much garbage (which is important for any data-heavy processing), and all is good.


The common case of parallelism is usually fine with process/message passing work IMO.

For the other 20% of the time... threads are awesome. :)




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