Re: [Haskell-cafe] Real-time garbage collection for Haskell

On Mon, Mar 1, 2010 at 2:37 PM, Thomas Schilling wrote:

On 1 March 2010 16:27, Job Vranish wrote:

...

My current area of work is on realtime embedded software programming for avionics systems. We do most of our coding in Ada but I've been dreaming of using haskell instaed.

A possible workaround would be to sprinkle lots of 'rnf's around your code to make sure you don't build up a thunk or two that will delay you later. And if you do this, aren't you essentially programming in a strict functional language (like SML or O'Caml)? By careful profiling you and auditing you can probably rule out most of the potential bad cases, so it can be acceptable for a soft real-time system (Galois did something like this, I believe). But for avionics systems you probably want to more assurances than that, don't you?

Yes and no. It's true that lazy evaluation makes reasoning about timings a bit more difficult (and might not be usable in very time critical scenarios) but it is still has well defined deterministic behavior. It's the referential transparency that saves us here. If you run a lazy function with the same objects (in the same evaluation state) it should _theoretically_ take the same amount of time to run. All of our toplevel inputs will be strict, and if we keep our frame-to-frame state strick, our variances in runtimes, given the same inputs, should be quite low modulo the GC. Even our current code can take significantly different amounts of time to compute things depending on what you're doing. Some waypoints take longer to lookup from the database than others. Predicting the time to arrival can take significantly longer/shorter depending on seemingly trivial parameters, etc... It matters less that code always takes the same amount of time to run (though it needs to always be less than the frame time) and more so that it always takes the same amount of time to run given the same initial conditions. - Job