ben.franksen:
Galchin, Vasili wrote:
Thank you Murray. My post was not so clear .... I was referring to "automatic" parellelization vs "manual" parallelization. By "automatic" I mean the programmer doesn't have to indicate where to parallelize ... instead the compiler decides how to parallize!
Not on the horizon, it's too difficult. The best effort I know of automatically introduces par to the code /after running/ the program a few times (with the same given input data). There was some paper somewhere describing the idea and what the results were (IIRC, they achieved a respectable speedup in cases where there was enough potential for parallelization). Note this is /not/ something a compiler could do.
For restricted subsets of Haskell (e.g. data parallel array programming), the compiler can essentially do this. But you have to restrict yourself enough to make the problem (and cost model) tractably to do automatically. -- Don