Concurrent Haskell (GHC) and Win32 Applications ?

Ketil Z. Malde ketil@ii.uib.no
12 Mar 2002 10:50:54 +0100


"Simon Peyton-Jones" <simonpj@microsoft.com> writes:

> | Ahem - how far would this be from a "real" multithreaded 
> | implementation, i.e. one that could use a few OS threads to 
> | take advantage of multiple CPUs in an SMP system?

> Not very far.  We have had a working implementation of 
> such a thing, but not in a robust releasable state.

Really!?  Wow!

I have at my disposal an 8-CPU Sun and a (well, less disposable, but
access to, at any rate) a cluster of three 64-CPU Regattae.  I also
have at hand compute-heavy problems with a Haskell-implemented
solution.  Do let me know when you have something you'll let an
amateur with no compiler experience loose upon, won't you? :-)

When I last asked about, it seemed that parallell Haskell was the way
to go for performance gain, but sadly GPH is lagging real GHC a bit,
and worse, is using PVM for parallellisation.  As far as I understand,
this means a lot of heap duplication (which hurts, since I consume
lots of memory) and needless communication overhead on SMPs.

May I assume that, if/when a multithreaded RTS stabilises, the
paradigms from parallell Haskell can easily be implemented on it
("easily" meaning that it'll probably happen)?

At the moment, I'm working on getting my program correct, so I'm only
charting the waters, as it were, for parallellisation.

-kzm
-- 
If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants