On Friday, April 20, 2012, Milan Straka wrote:
Hi Simon,
I went to Aleksandar Prokopec's talk about Concurrent Tries at the Scala day earlier this week. I thought it was pretty cool. Here's the paper.
http://infoscience.epfl.ch/record/166908/files/ctries-techreport.pdf
Nice :)
Maybe we should have a Haskell version? Maybe we already do?
I think we do not have any nontrivial concurrent structures (we have MVar and FIFO + Semaphore built on top of it).
Most of work seem to be done on persistent structures. On that front, Johan's unordered-containers package implements the hash tries, which are roughly the described CTries without concurrent updates.
The data structure described in the paper above is based on the same data structure I use, so it shouldn't be too hard to build a concurrent version.
I am not sure it would be worth implementing a structure in Haskell that is inherently concurrent. For me it was always enough to wrap a persistent structure in an MVar, so updates are performed sequentially and accesses can be made in parallel.
I think it is worth implementing. We use the MVar strategy in the IO manager, but it scales poorly.
Such a structure would probably have to be strict and in an ST monad, to get a usable and deterministic behaviour.
Any thoughts?
Cheers, Milan
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