Quoth Paul Rubin <http://[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
| Right now I'm mainly interested in OCaml, Haskell, Erlang, and maybe | Occam. Haskell seems to have the happiest users, which is always a | good thing. Erlang has been used for real-world systems and has | built-in concurrency support. OCaml seems to crush Haskell and Erlang | (and even Java) in performance. I'm sure you're aware that these are all arguable. In particular, shootout figures aren't a really reliable way to find out about performance. | The idea is to use one of those languages for a personal project after | my current work project wraps up pretty soon. This would be both a | learning effort and an attempt to write something useful. I'm | thinking of a web application like a discussion board or wiki, | intended to outperform the existing ones, i.e. able to handle a | Slashdot or Wikipedia sized load (millions of hits/day) on a single | fast PC instead of a rack full. "Single fast PC" will probably soon | come to mean a two-cpu-chip motherboard in a 1U rack box, where each | cpu chip is a dual core P4 or Athlon, so the application should be | able to take advantage of at least 4-way multiprocessing, thus the | interest in concurrency. Oh. Note that the FP world has been historically attracted to the "green" thread model, where threads are implemented in the runtime like (old) Stackless micro-threads, much faster and more tractable for runtime data structures ... but runs on only one CPU at a time. Ocaml & I believe current ghc support native OS threads, Erlang I would guess not but wouldn't know for sure. Don't know about ghc internals, the way I remember it ocaml's native thread system has something like Python's global lock, instead of locks around each memory management function etc. Donn Cave, [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list