[r6rs-discuss] Implicit parallel Scheme (was Re: Parallel-Scheme [was: Thoughts on Scheme's Future])

[John Cowan]

Antonio Vieiro scripsit:

> Finally, explicit parallel Scheme is, in my opinion, the *wrong* way to go
> (as explicit memory management is, for instance). Understanding explicit
> parallel programs (either in Scheme or any other language) is usually
> difficult. Debugging and maintaining them is usually the worst nightmare of
> a developer. (I can't imagine debugging a Scheme program with threads,
> semaphores, locks, and continuations all messed up).

I entirely agree, but there are ways around that problem: see Erlang.
The difficulty with implicit parallelism is that it takes more brains
than our tools have (possibly more brains than *we* have) to figure out
exactly which instances of parallelism should result in actual concurrent
execution, and which ones are not worth the considerable extra overhead.

-- 
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