[Haskell-cafe] Re: Automatic parallelism in Haskell, similar to "make -j4"?

[Alexander Dunlap]

On Tue, Nov 4, 2008 at 7:34 PM, Chad Scherrer <chad.scherrer at gmail.com> wrote:
> T Willingham <t.r.willingham <at> gmail.com> writes:
>> I am thinking of our troglodytic friend 'make', which will run (for
>> example) 4 parallel jobs when given the option "make -j4".  Even
>> 'rake', the ruby version of make, now has a branch (called drake)
>> which does the parallel -j option.
>
> >From the replies I've seen about this, I think it's been interpreted as asking
> whether ghc could compile a given program so that it will execute in parallel.
> In general that's a hard problem.
>
> On the other hand, it should be really straightforward (in principle, I mean) to
> get something going like
> ghc --make -j4 Foo.hs
> similar to your make example, so that compile time could be reduced, while the
> execution could either be sequential or parallel. I don't think there's anything
> like this yet (is there?).
>
> Does anyone have any thought what it would take to get this going?
>
> Chad

I believe that's the one of the points of the hbuild project (see
http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/hackage/wiki/HBuild).

Alex