[m-dev.] questions about grades

[Michael Day]

> Because .par means something different on each backend, I find it hard to
> distill what .par means for all backends.  The closest sucsinct description
> that is truthful is "thread safety and concurrency support".

If history had worked out a little differently, perhaps Mercury would 
have support for concurrency in all the default grades, with a couple of 
specific "nonpar" grades for the C backends that offer a slight 
performance boost in exchange for breaking concurrency.

Of course, multithreaded GC on eight cores means that even 
single-threaded programs may typically run faster in .par grades, now...

Michael

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