Hackathon hesitation
Hi, I'm interested in attending the Hackathon, but I don't have any previous experience working on compilers. I think it could be a great learning experience, but I certainly don't want to slow progress on any work by just hanging around asking questions. I'm a mathematician/statistician, and my programming experience is limited to high-level languages like Python, R, and Haskell. I can read C (sort of), but I've been too frustrated by the lack of high-level features to do anything useful with it. I've been using Haskell for about 2 years now (every chance I get), and I'm very interested in using it to allow high-performance (preferably parallel) code to be written at a very high level of abstraction. Given this, does it seem there would be much I could help with? Thanks, Chad Scherrer "Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana" -- Groucho Marx
At Wed, 12 Jul 2006 10:57:54 -0700, Chad Scherrer wrote:
[1
] [1.1 ] Hi, I'm interested in attending the Hackathon, but I don't have any previous experience working on compilers.
Perhaps we should start a list of pre-session recommended reading on the wiki page? I would recommend at least skimming the following papers/books: Implementing functional languages: a tutorial Simon Peyton Jones and David Lester. Published by Prentice Hall, 1992. http://research.microsoft.com/~simonpj/Papers/pj-lester-book/ Typing Haskell in Haskell (1999) Mark P. Jones http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/jones99typing.html Implementing Lazy Functional Languages on Stock Hardware: the Spineless Tagless G-machine Simon L. Peyton Jones http://research.microsoft.com/research/pubs/view.aspx?pubid=179 I like those because you can get a lot out of them, even if you have no prior compiler experience. Anyone have other suggestions? j.
Hello Jeremy, Wednesday, July 12, 2006, 10:43:22 PM, you wrote:
I'm interested in attending the Hackathon, but I don't have any previous experience working on compilers.
Perhaps we should start a list of pre-session recommended reading on the wiki page? I would recommend at least skimming the following papers/books:
just a piece of one my letter in ghc-users list: Thursday, May 4, 2006, 10:00:55 PM, you wrote:
So I'm interested in working on the project on improving numerics performance in GHC proposed on the SoC page here http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/summer-of-code/ticket/13
which states "GHC's performance for double and float intensive code is not as good as it could be. Find out why and improve it. Requires GHC backend hacking. Must be very Haskell literate or have knowledge of code generators." i can't agree with this statement - source of problem is well known, it's an inefficient STG-to-asm translation. and we know two ways to solve this problem - either translate STG to idiomatic C code, as jhc does and then rely on perfect GCC optimization, or make STG-to-asm translation more efficient. last time it was discussed here in Feb'06 in general, it's too complex problem, otherwise Simons may already work on it, because current ghc-generated code is, say, 3 times slower than it could be. this sort of optimization will change performance for any program, not only numeric-intensive ones. one possible rather simple sub-project may be dealing with "leaf" functions with strict arguments and results - i'm not sure but it's possible that implementing this optimization will make significant shift exactly in numeric intensive code. to decide this, it will be great to see this "numeric intensive code" for beginning Friday, May 5, 2006, 8:50:18 PM, you wrote:
In order to get familiar with GHC's innards, is there anything particular I should begin with? At the moment I'm just reading through the user's guide.
i suggest you to read discussion i already mentioned. and also papers: http://www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/papers/unboxed-values.ps.gz http://www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/papers/run-time-system.ps.gz http://www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/papers/new-rts.ps.gz http://www.research.microsoft.com/~simonpj/Papers/inlining/inline-jfp.ps.gz -- Best regards, Bulat mailto:Bulat.Ziganshin@gmail.com
Chad Scherrer wrote:
I'm interested in attending the Hackathon, but I don't have anyprevious experience working on compilers.
One book I'm reading right now is "Modern Compiler Implementation in ML" (http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~appel/modern/ml/). The author writes a compiler of increasing complexity as the book progresses. He focuses on a practical approach, eschewing a rigorous introduction to the lambda calculus, for instance -- this suits me, as there are good references elsewhere on the latter. It's in NJ Standard ML, but I've found it relatively straightforward to understand. Another question regarding the hackathon: will anyone be video taping the presentations? I live in europe and travel will be prohibitive: it would be nice if the presentations where mpeg'd and dumped onto the haskell website so that anyone can watch them! Martin
Martin Percossi
Another question regarding the hackathon: will anyone be video taping the presentations? I live in europe and travel will be prohibitive: it would be nice if the presentations where mpeg'd and dumped onto the haskell website so that anyone can watch them!
I have volunteered to record them as webcasts. They will appear somewhere on the web, probably a couple of weeks after the event. Regards, Malcolm
Feel free to come! At worst, some of the material will be incomprehensible (although I hope not), but you'll get to meet an interesting bunch of people. Simon From: haskell-cafe-bounces@haskell.org [mailto:haskell-cafe-bounces@haskell.org] On Behalf Of Chad Scherrer Sent: 12 July 2006 18:58 To: haskell-cafe@haskell.org Subject: [Haskell-cafe] Hackathon hesitation Hi, I'm interested in attending the Hackathon, but I don't have any previous experience working on compilers. I think it could be a great learning experience, but I certainly don't want to slow progress on any work by just hanging around asking questions. I'm a mathematician/statistician, and my programming experience is limited to high-level languages like Python, R, and Haskell. I can read C (sort of), but I've been too frustrated by the lack of high-level features to do anything useful with it. I've been using Haskell for about 2 years now (every chance I get), and I'm very interested in using it to allow high-performance (preferably parallel) code to be written at a very high level of abstraction. Given this, does it seem there would be much I could help with? Thanks, Chad Scherrer "Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana" -- Groucho Marx
participants (6)
-
Bulat Ziganshin -
Chad Scherrer -
Jeremy Shaw -
Malcolm Wallace -
Martin Percossi -
Simon Peyton-Jones