[LLVMdev] 2.2 garbage collector questions

Scott Michel
Wed, 06 Feb 2008 01:26:13 -0000

thomas weidner wrote:
>>The reason why I ask is that I expressed an outrageous opinion at
>>Supercomputing back in November, to wit, that CL is probably the best
>>language suited for today's multicore problems... but I don't
have the
>>time to hack one of the current implementations to proove the point.
>
>
> interesting, what makes lisp superior in this area over languages with
explicit
> support for parallell computing (like erlang? or Ada) or languages which
may be
> easier auto parallelized (like haskell because of its functional nature).

Lisp macros make it much easier to "rewrite" the program to both
analyze
the code and take advantage of certain features. Few, if any, other
languages have this feature or plan to implement it.

For example, assume that the loop macro could be extended in such a way
that one could analyze dependencies within the loop -- if there are no
dependencies, you get automagic parallelized code. Similarly, the macro
could be extended in such a way as to eliminate the dependencies, again,
automagic parallelization.


-scooter