Hacker News Reader

HNHacker News

Top New Best Ask Show Jobs

Comment by uticus | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

uticus·

- No multithreading - Not popular - Requires graphics interaction

View on HN

> - Requires graphics interaction

I don't think that's the case; e.g. GNU Smalltalk doesn't need any graphics https://www.gnu.org/software/smalltalk

> - No multithreading

I'd rephrase this as concurrency/parallelism. Multithreading is just one (particularly awful) way of implementing that; arguably Smalltalk would be better suited to an actor model (like Erlang).

Yes, Smalltalk and Pony have actors, Go has goroutines, C# has tasks, there is more than one way to skin a cat.

Come on... ad populum appeal is not a strong one. And you can run most Smalltalk distros with a headless option. Let's not pretend using it for IDE is the same as deployed to production. Be fair.

And yet node.js scales without threads.

But Python is popular and has no multithreading.

Python has multithreading, they just don't run concurrently. Which may or may not be suitable for your application. E.g. you can't simultaneously utilize multiple cores, but you can listen to several blocking IO bound tasks.

Well, that seems to be concurrency without parallelism. Smalltalk has concurrency, too, at least according to this: https://books.pharo.org/booklet-ConcurrentProgramming/

and this: https://tonyg.github.io/squeak-actors/

That's not technically correct: you can use the multiprocessing library (or the concurrent.futures one, for a more ergonomic api) to spawn cpython processes over multiple cores.

It is technically correct, multiprocessing doesn't spawn threads and that has several important consequences.

In practice though, processes are usually good enough.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com