[Haskell-cafe] Re: Why functional programming matters

[Achim Schneider]

ChrisK <haskell at list.mightyreason.com> wrote:

> 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.
> 
"By the time you learnt how to write proper Haskell, that's most likely
implemented in an arcane one-liner using par."

-- 
/me aleady drank a bootle of vin and suggests that you don't answer
seriously if you want to get non-abstroose anwererse.