Newsgroups: comp.parallel
From: rlarowe@phish.ecii.org (Rick LaRowe)
Subject: Re: SMP programming under WindowsNT
Organization: Enterprise Computing Institute, Inc., Hopkinton, MA
Date: Wed, 15 Nov 1995 19:10:42 GMT
Message-ID: <48ddvi$ass@phish.ecii.org>

In article <484u75$jb4@newsflash.hol.gr> angelis@hol.gr (Angelis Adam) writes:
>I am interested in programming SMP applications under WindowsNT. For the
>time being, I have not any experience with programming under WindowsNT. I
>don't even know if SMP programming libraries exist.
>
>I would like to hear from people who have developed multi-threaded
>applications under WindowsNT. What tools did you use? How did they rank?
>Were you satisfied by the result?

You might consider something we don't hear much about in this newsgroup:
Ada 95.  While Ada earned a bad rep in many communities, the new standard
includes many features that improve usability, flexibility, interoperation
with other languages (e.g., standardized interfaces to C, Fortran, etc.),
and most importantly to your question, tasking and concurrent programming.
Since you are doing numerical stuff, the numerics annex, which specifies
all sorts of stuff about different floating point precisions, etc., is
probably of particular interest to you.

And now, with the availability of GNAT through the Free Software
Foundation, you can get an Ada 95 compiler for free that runs on just about
any platform you want.  (GNAT uses the gcc backend, and in fact, is invoked
with "gcc".)  Several companies have adopted GNAT as a commercial offering;
SGI, for example, provides support for a validated GNAT.  ACT (Ada Core
Technologies) is a company spun-off by the NYU folks that developed the 
GNAT system to provide support for GNAT.

Note that since the support for concurrent programming is part of the 
language, it is fairly easy to write portable applications this way.

Most relevent to your inquiry is a company called LabTek that provides 
support for GNAT on Windows NT platforms (as well as Windows 95).  LabTek
also provides other support tools and bindings to the typical Windows stuff.  
You can contact them at LabTek@cs.yale.edu for more info.  Info on GNAT can 
be found on the web at http://cs.nyu.edu/cs/projects/gnat/, and you can find 
all sorts of other Ada 95 related information at the Yahoo site
http://www.yahoo.com/Computers/Languages/Ada/.

Sorry for the blatant Ada 95 plug ... I'm fairly new to the Ada world, 
and am pretty impressed at the opportunities it provides.

Regards,

Rick LaRowe
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