Upcoming article in Dr. Dobbs'

[Matthias Lang]

Carsten Schultz writes:

 > Ok, but the question still remains what an Erlang machine should look
 > like that takes advantage of several processors.  Map the many Erlang
 > processes to a small number of OS threads?  How to do the balancing?
 > Or map one Erlang process to one OS thread in the hope that OS threads
 > have become efficient enough and will even become better with new
 > demands?  Eg, how good is that Linux 2.6 stuff really?
 > 
 > Are there any experimental implementations in that direction?

I'm not quite sure what the 'that' refers to, but a reasonably
complete Erlang implementation was made which used multiple threads in
a symmetric way within one emulator:

  http://www.erlang.se/publications/xjobb/0089-hedqvist.pdf

i.e. not just for IO. As far as I can tell, the result had all the
hoped-for performance characteristics. But IIRC

  - It was a JAM VM, not a BEAM VM.

  - It didn't support the binary syntax

  - It didn't work on windows

A parallel BEAM machine would be neat, but Joe just prophecised it to
death an hour ago, since such a beast would need to use shared
data. But maybe the erlang VM is blessed by some sort of Erlang
goodness ooze-down effect.

Matthias