Newsgroups: comp.lang.tcl,comp.parallel.pvm
From: Jan Nijtmans <nijtmans@nici.kun.nl>
Subject: Re: ANNOUNCE: Tkpvm version 1.1 available
Organization: NICI (Nijmegen Institute of Cognition and Informatics)
Date: Thu, 12 Dec 1996 16:55:28 +0100
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Message-ID: <32B02AF0.70EC@nici.kun.nl>

Mikhail Teterin wrote:

> Does it eliminate a need in TCL-DP?

It is not meant as a replacement for Tcl_DP; Sockets are now
part of Tcl, so I guess that many functions of Tcl-Dp now can
be done by Tcl alone.

Advantages of Tkpvm:
- Very simple higher-level syntax.
- Uses the PVM standard. Tkpvm processes can communicate
  with other PVM processes written in C or fortran (using
  the appropriate PVM libraries)
- All necessary conversions (e.g between little-endian and
  big-endian) are done automatically.
- Very fast. If faster methods than sockets are available on
  the machine (e.g. shared memory on multi-processor machines)
  these will be used.

Disadvantage:
- Totally built on top of the PVM library, which is not distributed
  together with Tkpvm.  Tkpvm can only be build when both Tcl/Tk
  and PVM are already fully installed on the system.

