On 8/11/07, Neil Bartlett
You're absolutely right that a dynamic/adaptive approach is the only one that will work when the tasks are of unknown size. Whether this approach is as easy as you think is open for you to prove. I look forward to testing your VM implementation,
Well... obviously migrating Haskell to use a VM is itself non-trivial ;-) There are two obstacles: - technical - political The technical obstacle means implementing it. Given that high performance VMs exist this is largely pure software engineering, rather than research? The political obstacle means: pursuading people to use it if it were written. If no-one uses it, it wont be maintained, and is basically pretty useless. The main reasons why it might not be used are: - breaks the status quo / de facto standard - provides no advantage in a single-core environment Breaking the status quo is not an inconsiderable obstacle, but it would be broken if there was a real advantage of using automatic threading, which there is not right now because most machines are single-cored. Whilst it's the right time to think about how to implement things, it's maybe a year or two early to actually implement it and expect people to use it. What I think is: - automatic threading is not really that hard. Once you've got a pure FP running in a VM, the actual automatic threading bit is pretty easy (largely software engineering, not research) - when machines become multicored, Microsoft will just take F# (which already runs in a VM I guess? but not sure if it's an FP-dedicated VM, they might need to build one), and just slot in the automatic threading bit.
or at the very least reading your paper on the subject ;-)
Writing a paper would be fun. I think I'm a little out of my depth to be writing a paper ;-) but just on the off-chance, how does one go about writing a paper and getting it published? Does one have to be a member of an accredited institution, or can one write one as a "freelancer"? If one has to be a member of an accredited institution, what are the options?