multiprocessing vs thread performance

[James Mills]

On Wed, Dec 31, 2008 at 12:29 AM, Aaron Brady <castironpi at gmail.com> wrote:
> James, Hi.  I'm glad you asked; I never know how "out there" my
> comments are (but surmise that feedback is always a good thing).  What
> I was thinking was, I didn't know Virtual Synchrony, and I've never
> used Erlang, but I'm interested in concurrency especially as it
> pertains to units of work, division of labor, and division of context;
> and generators are another way to divide context.  So: I wanted to put
> more of my background and interests on the table.  What I said wasn't
> directly relevant, I see.  But it's not like I
> "dissertated" (discussed) the Tibettan-Austrian spice trade.  I think
> I just want to say stuff about threading!  Maybe I'm just excited to
> meet people who share my interests... not unheard of.

Glad to see others also interested in these topics :)

(snip)

> 'Circuits' doesn't use generators.  I think generators are an
> underexplored technique.  Is 'circuits' assembly line or start-to-
> finish, if my analogy makes any sense?  'Circuits' is event-driven,
> but I don't see any difference between 'event-driven' and
> multithreaded in general.  (I think contrast can create a good picture
> and a clear understanding.)  What is special about an 'event-driven'
> architecture?  Are you distinguishing blocking from polling?

I'll shortly be releasing circuits-1.0 today hopefully.
To answer your question, circuits is inspired by a
software architecture that my most favoured
lecturer a few years back was teaching. That is:
 * Behaviour Trees (design)
and consequently:
 * The concept of "everything is a Component"
 * Systems and Sub-Systems are built upon Components
and
 * Everything is an event.
and
 * An emergent property of such systems are "Behaviour".

That being said, circuits employs both an event-driven
approach as well as a Component architecture.
In your analogy it is both horizontal and vertical.

As I continue to develop circuits and improve it's
core design as well as building it's ever growing set
of Components, I try to keep it as general as
possible - my main aim though is distributed
processing and architectures. (See the primes example).

Thanks for sharing your interest :)

cheers
James