Getting Involved

[Simon Marlow]

On 29/11/13 12:39, Blair Archibald wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I'm looking to get involved working on GHC - I've been using Haskell for
> quite a while now and thought I'd give back to the community.
>
> Bit about me: I'm Blair an (4th year) Undergraduate at the University of
> Glasgow and my main interests at the moment are Functional Programming,
> Runtime systems (mainly memory management/GC work) and Transactional
> Memory (making GHC a great place to be!)

As I mentioned on the Haskell Cast, there is plenty of scope for 
speeding up STM in particular.  One problem with getting started though 
is that we don't have a good benchmark suite, and any well-tuned 
programs that use STM will already be avoiding the known issues (like 
sensitivity to the size of transactions).  The C/C++ STM community has 
some good benchmarks, e.g. http://stamp.stanford.edu/, I think it would 
be great to translate some of these to Haskell, and then use them as a 
starting point to look for ways to optimise the implementation.  There's 
also a rather large literature on optimising STM for C/C++, some of 
which is probably useful.

> I've noticed that there is talk of adding a better flags parser to the
> RTS and this seems like a good place to start (less likely to break
> things!). Ticket: #4243
>
> Is anyone currently working in this area or have plans to start work in
> this area?

There was someone else looking at it... I forget who.  Try searching the 
archives.

Cheers,
	Simon