[Swift-devel] Scala

[Mihael Hategan]

On Sun, 2009-10-25 at 11:00 -0500, Michael Wilde wrote:

> Swift-as-a-library seems to me to have potential similar to MPI to 
> achieve great success - wider that Swift-as-a-language - while not 
> eliminating the benefits and continued support and improvement of the 
> current system.

Btw, I have reasons to believe this is not true. CoG+Java (and then the
python cog + python) already provide the tools necessary to achieve most
of this. A parallel parameter sweep would look like this (boilerplate
removed):

Task[] tasks = new Task[params.length];
for(int i = 0; i < params.length; i++) {
  tasks[i] = buildAndSubmitTask(params[i]);
}
for(int i = 0; i < tasks.length; i++) {
  tasks[i].waitFor();
}

There is also a scheduler to take care of scheduling, with an API and
many other things. All documented, with examples, a hefty FAQ, papers,
posters, etc.

Didn't work. I suspect because complexity is not in how hard it is to do
something, but how hard it is to distinguish the right solution from the
sea of potential solutions. In which case a "canned" solution works
better.

And frankly I wouldn't use it either. If something goes wrong from a
programming standpoint, throubleshooting each "workflow" is a pain,
because there is no clear separation between the domain specific problem
and the library. In debugging, I wouldn't be able to separate the two.
Whereas in Swift as it is, it's much easier to distinguish between a
runtime-swift bug and having written your script wrong. The library is a
carrot in a soup. Swift is layered.