[pcwalton]

Sounds interesting. Do you have any links to documentation?

I'm interested in reading more about it, because Nim is doing a lot of experimental stuff and it's always interesting to look at its designs.

(Edited to remove speculation about how well it will perform before reading about it.)

[rbehrends]

Well, this is currently highly speculative. What I proposed to Andreas was essentially a model based on Eiffel's SCOOP (with some additional influence from Erlang). Whether it's a practical design remains to be seen.

Note that shared, lockable heaps need not be heavyweight structures. It is entirely possible to imagine a shared hash table with one heap per bucket and fine-grained locking, for example. Collections for such small heaps can be fast because the number of roots is limited, and (depending on what invariants you guarantee), you can even forgo stack scanning for most collections or limit the number of stack frames that need to be traversed.

[pcwalton]

Neat, I'll read more on SCOOP. Thanks!

[rbehrends]

SCOOP is not a horribly complicated idea (well, other than the using preconditions as wait conditions, which has been critiqued in the past and is not a critical ingredient). It's basically an extension of the basic idea of monitors. It is based on the idea of having a unified approach for shared memory and distributed system and accomplishes that by assuming that objects can be partitioned into disjoint ("separate") data spaces, access to which is regulated to ensure mutual exclusion; this is why it translates nicely to a model involving thread-local heaps.

At the programming language level, this then mostly involves maintaining mutual exclusion (in Eiffel, the necessary semantics are attached to how "separate" types are handled) and having the optimizer get rid of unnecessary copies.