[MLton] Multicore CPU's and MLton

[Daniel C. Wang]

Hi all,
Just going to finally give in and invest in a new PC. Looking, around 
these days all the PC seems to becoming dual core. You can pick up a 
dual core Pentium D these days for $1099 at gateway including a 15 LCD 
monitor! I might sit on my hands, until I can find a similar priced AMD 
x2, but it seems like anything I'm going to buy is going to be dual core.

Anway, I was wondering is there any quick and dirty way for MLton to 
take advantage of that extra core... SML/NJ CM has a parallel build.. 
option which is nice.. but it seems like the whole program approach to 
MLton seems to be in conflict with the hardware CPU trends... (on the 
plus side seems like most new PC will ship with 1GB standard to be 
Windows Longhorn ready :))

Is there maybe some way to at least pipe-line the compilaition process, 
such that the frontend is in one thread spit outing code for the rest of 
the backend to compile and optimize.

On, a related note. are there any cool opitmizations that could be 
applied to make ML programs more concurent in a some what transparent 
way. Multi-core systems with lots of concurent threads seem to be the 
future.