Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!wuarchive!gem.mps.ohio-state.edu!apple!cambridge.apple.com!alms From: alms@cambridge.apple.com (Andrew L. M. Shalit) Newsgroups: comp.object Subject: Re: Parallelism and OOPSs Message-ID: Date: 5 Oct 89 15:21:35 GMT References: <477@schaefer.MATH.WISC.EDU> Sender: news@cambridge.apple.com Organization: Apple Computer Inc, Cambridge, MA Lines: 18 In-reply-to: wayne@schaefer.MATH.WISC.EDU's message of 4 Oct 89 21:41:06 GMT In article <477@schaefer.MATH.WISC.EDU> wayne@schaefer.MATH.WISC.EDU (Rick Wayne) writes: since objects decompose so nicely into independent entities (at least abstractly), wouldn't this provide an excellent hook for introducing parallelism? could be loosely or tightly coupled; message passing would either be memory-to-memory transfer or network sends. this sounds so obvious that i'm sure SOMEBODY must be doing it (chorus of "that's the whole idea!" in the background), but in all the seminars i've sat through, this specific idea was never raised. Check out the Actors papers by Carl Hewitt and Henry Lieberman. This was landmark work a few years ago. They do exactly what you describe, and go into great detail. Their work is unrelated to the oo-language Actor which runs under windows (and came a few years later).