[MLton] Multicore CPU's and MLton

[Stephen Weeks]

> > 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.
> 
> Please don't do that... I am using MLton for an event driven state machine
> similar to state-threads.sf.net. If you make threads really concurrent, that
> would throw away the performance gain of this approach.
> 
> If real threading is added, I would like it to be a separate API from the
> current continuation-based system. I am pretty sure that's what people would
> have done anyway, but just what to emphasize that the current approach is
> preferrable in a few situations (specifically scaleable servers).

No worries -- I don't see concurrent threads replacing our multiplexed
threads any time soon, if ever.  It would be a separate API or a
compiler switch.  We would only replace if it didn't significantly
hurt performance, and I'm not convinced that's possible.