[MLton] Multicore CPU's and MLton

[Stephen Weeks]

> hmm, how much work do you think that would take?

I think the C codegn hack would be easy (hours).  The native codegen
one I'm not so sure, but probably a few days.  Hopefully Matthew will
comment.

I'm not sure I that the benefit is worth time spent, though.  At best
we'll see a 25% decrease in compile time, and this only for large
programs like MLton where a lot of time is spent in the native
codegen.

> Does the current MLTon thread library take advantage of real
> threading?

For the C codegen hack I'd use processes, so it wouldn't matter.  But
to answer your question, MLton implements its own threads using a
timer signal.  Threads don't run concurrently.  It would be nice to
see some time spent on solving that and possibly adding some source
language construct to make use of it.  But I imagine that's a lot of
work.