[Shootout-list] Re: process creation

[Bengt Kleberg]

greetings,

i have updated the about-this-test for process creation. the original 
text has been keept unchanged if possible. please let me know if things 
are unclear, and/or should be changed for the better.


About this test

For this test, each program should be implemented to do the same thing.

This test measures the speed of process (or thread) instantiation. In 
theory, a CO (Concurrency Oriented) language will have superior 
performance in this test. Let's see if our theory holds up!

This test has been designed to allow the number of simultaneous 
processes to grow with N. The purpose of this is to see how the timings 
changes as the number of processes increase.

After the process is created we want to make sure that it is actually up 
and running. So the job of creating the next process is given to the new 
process. Then the creating process should wait on/for an event of some 
kind. The actual event does not matter -- it could be a condition 
variable, a semaphore, an e-mail, whatever. The important thing is that 
it is an individual event, so that this particular process can be told 
to continue its execution without disturbing the other processes in this 
test. It is not allowed to use an event that will never be possible 
because some languages will notice this and garbage collect the prcocess.

The test program should take one argument, N, which is the number of 
processes to create.

The correct output, after all processes have been created, is N.

The algorithm for each process shall be as follows:

    1. if we have created all processes then print the number of 
processes and stop.
    2. if not, create a new process.
    3. finally wait for something that can happen.


bengt