On 29/11/13 12:39, Blair Archibald wrote:
Hi,
I'm looking to get involved working on GHC - I've been using Haskell for quite a while now and thought I'd give back to the community.
Bit about me: I'm Blair an (4th year) Undergraduate at the University of Glasgow and my main interests at the moment are Functional Programming, Runtime systems (mainly memory management/GC work) and Transactional Memory (making GHC a great place to be!)
As I mentioned on the Haskell Cast, there is plenty of scope for speeding up STM in particular. One problem with getting started though is that we don't have a good benchmark suite, and any well-tuned programs that use STM will already be avoiding the known issues (like sensitivity to the size of transactions). The C/C++ STM community has some good benchmarks, e.g. http://stamp.stanford.edu/, I think it would be great to translate some of these to Haskell, and then use them as a starting point to look for ways to optimise the implementation. There's also a rather large literature on optimising STM for C/C++, some of which is probably useful.
I've noticed that there is talk of adding a better flags parser to the RTS and this seems like a good place to start (less likely to break things!). Ticket: #4243
Is anyone currently working in this area or have plans to start work in this area?
There was someone else looking at it... I forget who. Try searching the archives. Cheers, Simon