[erlang-questions] Microsoft developer vision - functional programming

[Hugh Perkins]

On 10/18/07, Ulf Wiger (TN/EAB) <ulf.wiger@REDACTED> wrote:
> "...ideas from functional languages

The biggest idea from FP for parallel seems to be daring to copy all
the data to each thread, rather than letting multiple threads read a
single central copy.

The downside of that is obviously that it's insanely inefficient when
there is lots of data involved.

I guess this is already being done, but... presumably one could
optimize the runtime so that the data gets stored in "pages" (or
equivalent), and as long as no thread modifies the data, the "pages"
are shared, but if any thread tries to modify a page, that page
immediately gets forked into an independent copy for that particular
thread.