Re: Message queues: TIsland vs TIslandController

Matthew Fulmer wrote:
>> It is utterly trivial to write a little 
>> loop that executes all outstanding messages right away but it is also 
>> utterly pointless  
> 
> Well, that is exactly what I want to do. I want to use islands
> to handle parallel computation, like a higher-level MPI.
> Computation is timeless. I am working on how to demo this by
> writing a parallel raytracer using islands as the units of
> parallism.

I see. In this case I would probably recommend that you don't fiddle 
with the time base and merely use internal futures without explicit 
delta time. Those will be scheduled in the current time slot which means 
that all of your processing runs effectively at a single point in time 
but if you come to the point where you want to do some algorithm 
animation you can do that 'cause you haven't thrown out the time base 
yet 

> It would also be useful to have a controller that released
> messages under user controll, so that islands could be stepped,
> one message at a time, like the Tweak debugger can do, except
> with an entire island.

Right. That should be fairly straightforward.

Cheers,
   - Andreas