[erlang-questions] Deprecation and removal of the non-smp emulator

[Lukas Larsson]

Hello!

At the moment it is possible to build three different production versions
of the Erlang VM; the smp emulator, the threaded non-smp emulator and the
non-threaded non-smp emulator.

The non-smp versions have been kept around since the introduction of the
smp emulator as they can run on OS:s without thread support and also for
certain applications they provide a small performance boost. However we now
feel that they have outlived their usefulness and plan to remove them.

The main reason why we want to remove non-smp is because we do not want to
spend time on implementing the dirty-scheduler feature for threaded
non-smp, which is something we would have to do for the threaded non-smp
emulator to remain production quality. The different variants also increase
our test-scope by quite a lot, so reducing that is a very beneficial side
effect.

The current plan is for the non-smp emulators to be deprecated and not
built by default in OTP-20, and then removed completely in OTP-21.

If you have a very good reason for wanting to use the non-smp emulator,
please do let us know as soon as possible so that we can consider whether
we want to keep the non-smp version anyway.

Lukas
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