threading and multicores, pros and cons

[Paul Rubin]

"sjdevnull at yahoo.com" <sjdevnull at yahoo.com> writes:
> Java has historically had no support at all for real multiple process
> solutions (akin to fork() or ZwCreateProcess() with NULL
> SectionHandle), which should make up the vast majority of parallel
> programs (basically all of those except where you don't want memory
> protection).

I don't know what ZwCreateProcess is (sounds like a Windows-ism) but I
remember using popen() under Java 1.1 in Solaris.  That at least
allows launching a new process and communicating with it.  I don't
know if there was anything like mmap.  I think this is mostly a
question of library functions--you could certainly write JNI
extensions for that stuff.

> Has this changed in recent Java releases?  Is there a way to use
> efficient copy-on-write multiprocess architectures?

I do think they've been adding more stuff for parallelism in general.