Random questions after a long haskell coding day

[Ketil Z. Malde]

"Simon Marlow" <simonmar@microsoft.com> writes:

>> Can we also rely on destructive updates for the monadic arrays?

> In GHC, yes :-)

Goodie!

One more question: I imagine arrays give an opportunity to optimize by
unboxing the contained type -- any chance of that?  How much space
would an array of Chars consume compared to a list of Chars?

Meandering back to the original point of O(1) array access - my
feeling is that this should be a specific requirement of the
language.  I would like to be able to specify the asymptotic time
comlexity of my programs, but without knowing how primitives behave, I
can't.  Usually, I tend to avoid arrays, since I don't know how well
they'll behave. 

Is there a good reason (i.e. not just allowing lazy implementors use
lists) for *not* specifying it?

> We had a project to run concurrent/parallel Haskell programs on an SMP
> machine, but it is currently stalled.  There are some significant
> problems [...]

I see.

> The GPH (Glasgow Parallel Haskell) project is the implementation using
> PVM, which runs with a distributed rather than shared heap.

Yes.  So it seems PH is the way to go, then.  I'll get around to do
some tests, I hope.  ATM, it seems I'll use a large globally shared
data structure, this sounds a bit unPVM'ish, but I'll look into it.

> nevertheless, the GPH folks got some good speedups.  

(Any GPH folks have any rules of thumb handy?)

> Their implementation is lagging a bit behind the current GHC
> release, however: 

I can live with that, I think.

Thanks!

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