[Haskell-cafe] Re: Why functional programming matters

[ChrisK]

Achim Schneider wrote:
> Don Stewart <dons at galois.com> wrote:
> 
>> jwlato:
>>> In addition to STM, another item that should interest serious
>>> programmers is forkIO.  Lightweight threads that (unlike in Python)
>>> can use multiple cpu's.  Coming from Python, I personally appreciate
>>> this.  Using STM to handle concurrency issues often greatly
>>> simplifies multithreaded code.
>> And further on this, the use of `par` in pure code to make it go 
>> multicore is way beyond what most people think is possible.
>>
> I said _don't_ make me think of using par on a beowolf cluster of
> ps3's. Don't you guys have any scruples?
> 

Well... ghc still has a single-threaded garbage collector, so all the "par" 
threads must stop for garbage collection.  So scaling to the level of a cluster 
would be significantly sub-linear.

-- 
Chris