Not dumb questions at all.
Multicore adds parallelism via Domains (which are essentially heavyweight threads) and concurrency via Effects and fibers. There's a multicore GC that supports both of those.
We plan to upstream things in two parts. First domains-only parallelism and then effects as a follow-up. When the latter lands users will be able to define their own effects and handlers, yes.
Performance is pretty good, you can see our PLDI2021 paper for a proper performance evaluation and loads more details: https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.00250
Re:Multicore OCaml: April 2021
by NanoCoaster on Thursday May 13, 2021 @11:14AM
(#27143016)
Thank you, interesting stuff. Very much looking forward to user-definable effects! I like Ocaml in principal, but haven't yet strayed beyond learning the very basics some time ago. Seeing a usable implementation of algebraic effects in a somewhat popular language...that I gotta see :)
Worth pointing out you don't just need to stop at seeing it, you can get started playing around with it today: https://github.com/ocaml-multicore/multicore-opam#install-mu...
Re:Multicore OCaml: April 2021
by NanoCoaster on Thursday May 13, 2021 @12:20PM
(#27143932)
Cool, thanks for the link. Will definitely play around with it as soon as I find the time.
Too many programming languages, too little free time, sadly.
I'm under the impression that the implementation is based on algebraic effects. Does that include extending the language in a way that lets users define their own effects & handlers?
Also, how's the performance? Last time I looked this stuff up (and played around with Eff), which was quite a while ago, I was told that regular usage of effects may impact performance quite noticeably.