[MLton] approaches to parallelism in ML

[Stephen Weeks]

> How do mlton developers feel about supporting same address space
> parallelism in mlton?

I think it is important to get ASAP.  Although skaller is right that
we have to get the 64-bit port done first.  But that's coming.

I think the way to go is to first build a simple, non-concurrent,
stop-all-threads collector as a variant of MLton's current collector.
That should allow us to get up and running fairly quickly and to
handle certain kinds of apps, possibly even a good fraction of them.
This kind of collector was explored long ago for SML (both Poly/ML and
SML/NJ) running on SMP machines, see:

  Adding Threads to Standard ML
    http://mlton.org/References#CooperMorrisett90

  A Distributed Concurrent Implementation of Standard ML
    http://mlton.org/References#Matthews91

 Procs and locks: a portable multiprocessing platform for Standard ML
 of New Jersey.  
    http://mlton.org/References#MorrisettTolmach93