No More Callbacks: 10,000 Actors, 10,000 Threads, 10,000 Spaceships
Nice exemplar. Back when Java was being created, James Gosling was pretty insistent that concurrency be lightweight and scalable. When I ported it from SunOS 4 so Solaris 2.0 I had to move from the really light weight setjump()/longjmp() threads that he had implemented, into the thread system that Solaris had defined. There was a huge negative impact on performance (as I recall about 15x slower). That sucked because one of the coolest demos at the time had a little world in it where 'Fang' (the Java mascot) lived and a bunch of things in that world were all animated with threads. Looking at the 'fiber' model for threads I think they are much closer to what we should have done in the first place.<p>The thought was to have a billion threads on a SPARCStation 10 (that is like an old Pentium machine now). We never got close but it was a great goal. Definitely going to have to go back and revisit this topic now. Thanks for the excellent demo to play with!