On 09/09/2011 07:09 PM, Darren New wrote:
> On 9/9/2011 9:57, Orchid XP v8 wrote:
>> Well, yes, I was referring to the only architecture in existence that
>> people are likely to be writing desktop applications for. :-P
>
> I think even amongst Intel and AMD x64 and x86 architectures, this
> varies.

It probably varies on things like the Atom and other embedded stuff.

> I'm pretty sure it's not 100% automatic or there wouldn't be
> instructions for causing it to happen.

There are instructions for loading stuff without caching it, in case you 
happen to know that you're only going to access it once. There are 
instructions for flushing the cache, if you're about to do a context 
switch or you're controlling memory-mapped hardware. But as far as I 
know, you don't have to do anything special to get correct 
multi-processor behaviour. (Think about it; if you did, every 
multi-threaded application ever written would suddenly break when run on 
a multi-chip or multi-core setup.)

>> I saw a paper a while back about how Google (I forget which center)
>> translated part of the monitoring system from Python to Haskell, and
>> documented what they did and didn't find beneficial about this.
>
> Ah. Well, there's monitoring out the wazoo here, so I'm quite certain
> they didn't rewrite even a majority of it.

Oh, I'm sure they only translated one system. And it was only Google 
Netherlands (or somewhere like that), not the entire company. (Although 
it's surprising that different branches would actually do things 
differently...)

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