Re: [Haskell-cafe] Google Summer of Code - Lock-free data structures

On 19 March 2012 00:59, Chris Smith wrote:

On Mar 18, 2012 6:39 PM, "Florian Hartwig" wrote:

...

GSoC stretches over 13 weeks. I would estimate that implementing a data structure, writing tests, benchmarks, documentation etc. should not take more than 3 weeks (it is supposed to be full-time work, after all), which means that I could implement 4 of them in the time available and still have some slack.

Don't underestimate the time required for performance tuning, and be careful to leave yourself learning time, unless you have already extensively used ThreadScope, read GHC Core, and worked with low-level strictness, unpacking, possibly even rewrite rules.  I suspect that the measurable performance benefit from lockless data structures might be tricky to tease out of the noise created by unintentional strictness or unboxing issues.  And we'd be much happier with one or two really production quality implementations than even six or seven at a student project level.

-- Chris Smith

Thank you, Hofstadter's law definitely rears its head in many of my projects. I do have some experience with ThreadScope and strictness issues, but you I agree that I'm probably underestimating the time I need to learn. I also agree that my focus would be on quality rather than quantity. I quite like the modularity of this project, because it minimises the chance of having a lot of half-finished but useless code at the end of summer.