Cincom Smalltalk™ Foundation Series: MatriX

Most commercial applications do not leverage the power of today’s multi-core CPUs, largely in part to the fact that it is not trivial to do so.  Product management thought that this capability would be a large benefit to Smalltalkers, and challenged engineering to develop something in this space.   It was a challenge because doing something meaningful was daunting.

What came from that challenge was our multi-core solution.  The result fit the requirements of product management; it’s simple, pragmatic, easy to use and effective.  The framework our engineers developed is called Polycephaly—a term meaning “many heads.”

In talking to customers, several seem to be using it and enjoying its advantages.  In fact, one customer has seen a reduction of processing time by 72 percent!  That is effective indeed, under proper circumstances.

“We are successfully using Polycephaly in our project. One thing we use it for is to parallelize execution of (time-consuming) unit tests that check code quality. These tests execute at 28 percent of original time, when using Polycephaly on a quad-core box.” – Current Cincom® VisualWorks® customer

For more information about the Cincom Smalltalk Foundation, please watch Arden Thomas’ latest presentation from the 2013 Smalltalk Industry Conference here.