Sun Dec 6 18:15:13 EST 2009

Now maintaining the FreeBSD Qore Port

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  http://www.freshports.org/lang/qore/

  http://www.qore.org

I  bundled up the Qore programming language into a FreeBSD bundle
recently. It's a really great scripting language that I am  using
in some of my PhD research.

I have not run any benchmarks comparing it to Perl's threads (any
of them), but Qore (unlike Perl, or Python for  that  matter)  is
natively  multi-threaded.  This means that no tricks are required
to "multi-thread" its scripts. Perl, for example,  requires  that
communication  links/pipes be created among multiple heavy weight
Perl processes.

Perl's "forks" module attempts  to  simplify  the  interface  for
threading,  but the base module still must use sockets to facili-
tate communications among "threads". That's right, threading that
is  defined  implicitly  must be enabled explicitly using message
passing. This was partially alleviated through  "forks::Berkeley-
DB",  but  the only improvement was using BerkeleyDB over sockets
for communications. It is still explicit  under  the  hood.  What
would  be  incredibly  interesting  would  be  to  investigate  a
"forks::*" module that interface with a Qore interpreter running,
in  tandem. "forks::Qore" would hand off threading to an imbedded
Qore processes; I am not sure how you interface 2 languages  like
that, but it would definitely be an interesting thing to investi-
gate.

Qore on the other hand is a truly multi-threaded  scripting  lan-
guage.  It's  syntax is similar to Perl's, though it is certainly
not as flexible. It's Perl like enough (on the urface  at  least)
for  me to have picked it up quickly. It definitely deserves some
attention in all areas interested in shared  memory  parallelism,
rapid prototyping of ideas, and in the creation of multi-threaded
utilities.


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