Re: Ada Shootout program for K-Nucleotide (patches)

[Georg Bauhaus <rm.dash-bauhaus@futureapps.de>]

Ludovic Brenta schrieb:

> So I gather that Olivier was profiling an old version of the program.
> Correct?

Yes.  It likely is the one that has the home made Bounded_String.
But this one does not have the plain String generic yet.
(And a few other improvements.)

I haven't finished merging the new multitasking edition and
all of the new patches yet.  A final draft should
be ready this evening.  (Just drop the file name from the link
then to see a scratch paper style "manifest" if you like.)

Another possible improvement (maybe for regexdna, too) that
I have been thinking about is this:

Currently, the working tasks will themselves print
their results, after having finished all their work.
They do so in the required order with the help
of a protected Printer.  The printer features an
entry family (effectively one member per task). Guarding
is such that tasks can print only one after the other,
in the required order. (Printing is the last small thing
that the tasks perform before they can be terminated.)

The option I have been thinking of is, in the regexdna
case in particular, to allow some "future" work to
be done while the shared variable is collecting
results:  There might be free CPU capacity because, say
on a 4-core, one task hasn't finished, leaving two out of
four cores idling until the next rush of tasks
starts working on the second part of the program, e.g..

Miscellanea:

Does the size of the entry family (18, some not used) matter
much? (Most of the work is done by the tasks undisturbed.)

Should we requeue instead?

For K-Nucleotide all this didn't seem to matter much,
at least on the machines to which we have access:
Dropping the requirement of orderly printing is not
a big win. But who knows.