Personally, I think cooperative concurrency is making a big comeback.
Especially in a compiler-supporting form that relies on limited CPS
(continuation-passing-style) transformation. There are server and web
services applications that motivate it (i.e. in Scala, F# async work flows).
In Haskell we've got ContT for capturing the continuation of one
computation (and yielding to another). Monad-par is an example of a
framework based on ContT in which tasks cooperatively yield control
whenever their desired input data is not yet available.
-Ryan
On Tue, May 22, 2012 at 9:55 AM, Benjamin Ylvisaker
Has anyone ever worked on implementing something like this in Haskell?
http://www.cs.hmc.edu/~stone/papers/ocm-unpublished.pdf
The outline of the idea:
- Concurrent programming is really hard with the popular frameworks today. - For most purposes parallel programming is hard, in some part because it requires concurrent programming. Of course there are attempts to do non-concurrent parallel programming, but I hope it's not too controversial to say that such frameworks are still on the fringe. - Cooperative concurrency is way easier than preemptive concurrency because between invocations of pause/yield/wait, sequential reasoning works. - Historically, cooperative concurrency only worked on a single processors, because running threads in parallel would break the atomicity of sequential blocks (between invocations of p/y/w). - Researchers have been poring tons of effort into efficiently running blocks of code atomically. - Hey, we can do parallel cooperative multithreading!
The paper discusses implementations in Lua, C++ and C, but I think Haskell could be an awesome substrate for such a framework. Has anyone thought about this?
Ben
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