OCaml 2014: Multicore OCaml, Stephen Dolan

this is something i was looking into recently. the ocaml labs site is a good place to get updates. as a lab, they produce annual updates with some relevant information. this year's update had a pretty good section on multicore's progress. current challenge is in creating an efficient GC. this is a pretty good talk describing the problem. they're developing a system w/ tiered heaps (shared and isolated). you can see the day to day progress on github, though it's not incredibly easy to follow. hope that helps! i have a feeling project specific mailing lists might be more helpful.

Video here: link to this video

Confused about concurrency/parallelism terminology This is not *strictly* OCaml but in this talk the speaker says "fibers" which are used for concurrency are implemented using user threads whereas "domains" which are used for parallelism are implemented using system threads. I'm confused about a bunch of things here. Does that mean fibers won't be scheduled in parallel but rather just have their instructions interleaved? What is the difference between a user and system thread? If fibers are concurrent but can be run in parallel why bother with the more expensive domain abstraction? Where does the notion of process versus thread come into play? Is concurrency necessarily tied to processes…