Re: Mike and Ward, what next?

Roelf Toxopeus wrote:
> hi,
> I hope you're willing/able to comment on recent events,
> (for those wondering: Apple dumped PPC for Intel).
> Any roadmap?
> 
> regards
> -Roelf

This just came up on c.l.f.  Is is it possibly an alternative fork
following the dumping?

david


On Thu, 16 Jun 2005 07:50:35 GMT, anton@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
(Anton Ertl) wrote:


 >>Reading about Forth multi-tasking in Stephen Pelc's book, it seems to
 >>me that Forth does not yet deal with the problems of multiple tasks
 >>running on different processors in a shared-memory machine.


Could be wrong, but I kind of remember seeing somewhere... google
"parallel forth"  oh yes, here it is, it's Marcel Hendrix & Co...

http://home.iae.nl/users/mhx/i4threads.html

And even on ultratechnology...

http://www.ultratechnology.com/4thpar.html

I am guessing but with a native win32 forth compiler one could
probably nearly always get away with preemptive multitasking calling
the underlying OS but how messy this is, I do not know (yet). I
believe VFX has a few words to help with this but I've yet to mess
with multithreading in forth.

What is more interesting I think than mutlicore x86's is this new Cell
critter which I gather has a rather different paradigm compared to
traditional multicores.....

There is not much out on how to program one of these yet... but I
would reckon that initial development'll probably take the form of a c
or c++ with parallel/SIMD extensions, or even plain asm.

What do the expert compiler implementers think of the challenges of
adapting a forth to fully take advantage of Cell...

PS3's should be cheap-ish... It seems like a fun idea...

Cheers,
Rob