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 <benjaminy@fastmail.fm> wrote:

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http://www.cs.hmc.edu/~stone/papers/ocm-unpublished.pdf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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