Re: [Swarm-Modelling] Announce: metaABM 1.0.0

[Marcus G. Daniels]

Miles T. Parker wrote:
> All of the C derivatives are "pretty close" structurally and 
> syntactically -- which is why I think an Obj-C or C++ would be a good 
> next order target to shoot for
How about JavaScript?  Mozilla's working on integrating the 
Adobe/Macromedia JIT into Firefox, so there's the possibility it will be 
approximately as fast as Java in a few months.  Javascript is even more 
mutable and dynamic than Objective C.  Also modern JavaScript has useful 
features for ABM.  For example, there's a `yield' operator so that one 
`for' loop can yield to another and back again (much like a multilevel 
discrete event simulator, but simpler and closer to the language). 

Concerning the C variants:   C# also has a `yield'.  And C# has 
parallelizable language-level query:

  http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/07/10/PLINQ/default.aspx

I find this kind of functional query clean and versatile.   Consider 
this ray tracer:

 
http://blogs.msdn.com/lukeh/archive/2007/10/01/taking-linq-to-objects-to-extremes-a-fully-linqified-raytracer.aspx

Language integrated query is, I think, quite relevant to common ABM 
tasks like an agent looking around its neighborhood, especially if it is 
implicitly parallel!  And it doesn't mean depending on a Microsoft 
implementation.  Mono has most of C# 3.0 implemented.

But there's always a place for keeping real CPU architectures in mind 
and C++ seems to most practical option here.   GCC now has OpenMP, and 
libstdc++ a substantial set of parallelized operations:

 http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/libstdc++/parallel_mode.html

A toolkit that was built from the ground up this way (like libstdc++ is 
built up from OpenMP), or adopted such a library in many operations 
ought to scale well.  People that wanted to do Objective C things could 
just use the GCC Objective C++ compiler for some parts of a model.

Finally, perhaps with this metamodeling approach or others there's the 
possibility of not targeting a conventional programming language at all, 
but to have the modelling framework make calls against something like 
LLVM (http://llvm.org) and have native code generated in memory for the 
model itself.   Such an approach would of course build on a set of 
standard libraries for non-model things like the GUI.

Marcus