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Adapting the OCaml Ecosystem for Multicore OCaml

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Re: Adapting the OCaml Ecosystem for Multicore OCaml

#11

Post by kcsrk »

amelius wrote: post #7
rbjorklin wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding is that 4.14 is scheduled for Q1 2022 and 5.0 with multicore _might_ be released roughly in parallel.

Are there any benchmarks? Comparisons to other multicore runtimes, like GoLang's?

We don't compare against Go pervasively. Benchmarking across languages is hard generally, but here is a result on a specific benchmark comparing several versions of OCaml benchmarks against Go and Rust on a Http server benchmark: https://github.com/ocaml-multicore/retro-httpaf-bench/pull/1....

If there are suggestions to make the Go and Rust versions, please feel free to tell us how in the issue tracker.

Re: Adapting the OCaml Ecosystem for Multicore OCaml

#12

Post by sadiq »

amelius wrote: post #7
rbjorklin wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding is that 4.14 is scheduled for Q1 2022 and 5.0 with multicore _might_ be released roughly in parallel.

Are there any benchmarks? Comparisons to other multicore runtimes, like GoLang's?

Our paper from ICFP last year has extensive benchmarks against stock OCaml: https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.11663

In short there should be very little performance difference against stock.

As KC has linked in a sibling comment there's a project going to explore using effects to write high performance IO libraries and that has some early benchmarks.

Re: Adapting the OCaml Ecosystem for Multicore OCaml

#13

Post by dmitriid »

> Adapting the OCaml Ecosystem for Multicore

That's the thing that is missing in discussions around many languages. You can't just add multicore or actors to a language post-factum. Because by the time you get around to doing it everything in your language, from standard lib to third-party packages, has already been written with no concept of multi-anything.

And still, time and again, languages are being designed with these concerns as an afterthought.

Re: Adapting the OCaml Ecosystem for Multicore OCaml

#15

Post by rkangel »

dmitriid wrote: post #13

> Adapting the OCaml Ecosystem for Multicore That's the thing that is missing in discussions around many languages. You can't just add multicore or actors to a language post-factum. Because by the time you get around to doing it everything in your language, from standard lib to third-party packages, has already been written with no concept of multi-anything. And still, time and again, languages are being designed wit…

> And still, time and again, languages are being designed with these concerns as an afterthought.

Is that still happening? My impression is that any languages designed since multicore became common have thought very hard about their approach. The problem we have is that a lot of our languages have been around a while. Even Python is 30 years old at this point!

Erlang here is the miracle to me. Its programming model was designed for concurrency on a single core, but when SMP processers appeared all it needed was a VM change that was completely transparent to the programs above it and suddenly all Erlang programs were extremely parallel!

Re: Adapting the OCaml Ecosystem for Multicore OCaml

#17

Post by erk__ »

Zababa wrote: post #8
amelius wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there any benchmarks? Comparisons to other multicore runtimes, like GoLang's?

I remember seeing a graph where http/af, a http server, was close to Go net/http. I'll try to run https://github.com/ocaml-multicore/retro-httpaf-bench and report back. I also found another graph, but I'm too colorblind to read it properly https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/554131/131155247-f... . Edit: the benchmark fails to build

Yeah the colors are really not great for color blind people, I rather have some symbols or similar on them

Re: Adapting the OCaml Ecosystem for Multicore OCaml

#18

Post by 4ad »

rkangel wrote: post #15
dmitriid wrote: post #13

> Adapting the OCaml Ecosystem for Multicore That's the thing that is missing in discussions around many languages. You can't just add multicore or actors to a language post-factum. Because by the time you get around to doing it everything in your language, from standard lib to third-party packages, has already been written with no concept of multi-anything. And still, time and again, languages are being designed wit…

> And still, time and again, languages are being designed with these concerns as an afterthought. Is that still happening? My impression is that any languages designed since multicore became common have thought very hard about their approach. The problem we have is that a lot of our languages have been around a while. Even Python is 30 years old at this point! Erlang here is the miracle to me. Its programming model w…

Erlang was not designed for concurrency on a single core, it was designed for parallelism on multiple machines. Because of this, erlang processes do not share memory and SMP-level parallelism was easy to add.

Re: Adapting the OCaml Ecosystem for Multicore OCaml

#20

Post by Zababa »

erk__ wrote: post #17
Zababa wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember seeing a graph where http/af, a http server, was close to Go net/http. I'll try to run https://github.com/ocaml-multicore/retro-httpaf-bench and report back. I also found another graph, but I'm too colorblind to read it properly https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/554131/131155247-f... . Edit: the benchmark fails to build

Yeah the colors are really not great for color blind people, I rather have some symbols or similar on them

That's one of the small things I like about more complex charts (more complex than a picture): I can usually hover over the chart to see the label.
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