I have created a program that runs some isolated tasks in threads. Since there isn’t much documentation on multithreading, I’m using messages between threads to send tasks and receive task results (workerthreads I guess?).
When testing my program with the CPP backend it takes about 5 seconds, when using the C# backend it takes about 90 seconds and with the HL backend it takes 800+ seconds.
Is this an expected gap? Is HL really that much slower than CPP and even C#? I get that HL is a VM and CPP is native code but damn.
Note that I’m not bashing HL, I just want to know if using messages for communication between threads slows HL down or something like that.
Thanks for any insight!
EDIT: I can’t paste the real code, but this is conceptually what I do (I forgot to cache the initial length of the tasks variable in this code, I do check that in the real code, so it does actually work) :
import sys.thread.Thread;
typedef StringTask = {
stringToAnalyze: String,
references: Array<String>
}
typedef StringResult = {
result: String,
workerThread: Thread
}
class ForumSample{
static function main() {
// This is shared by all worker threads, but they never write to it,
// so no mutex is ok I assume?
var references = [for (i in 0...4) ""];
var tasks: Array<StringTask> = [for (i in 0...20) {stringToAnalyze: "", references:references}];
var mainThread = Thread.current();
for (i in 0...8) {
var t = Thread.create(() -> {
// Ignore that this will not properly terminate the thread
while (true) {
var task: StringTask = Thread.readMessage(true);
// Do some elaborate stuff
var res: StringResult = {result: "", workerThread: Thread.current()};
mainThread.sendMessage(res);
}
});
// "Start" the thread with first task
t.sendMessage(tasks.pop());
}
var resultsCalculated = 0;
while (resultsCalculated < tasks.length) {
var res: StringResult = Thread.readMessage(true);
res.workerThread.sendMessage(tasks.pop());
}
// Done
}
}
