[Haskell-cafe] Re: Go Haskell! -> array libraries

[Andrew Coppin]

Henning Thielemann wrote:
>
> On Fri, 28 Nov 2008, Simon Marlow wrote:
>
>> Manuel M T Chakravarty wrote:
>>> Claus Reinke:
>>>> What do those folks working on parallel Haskell arrays think about the
>>>> sequential Haskell array baseline performance?
>>>
>>> You won't like the answer.  We are not happy with the existing array 
>>> infrastructure and hence have our own.  Roman recently extracted 
>>> some of it as a standalone package:
>>>
>>>   http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/vector
>>>
>>> In the longer run, we would like to factor our library into 
>>> DPH-specific code and general-purpose array library that you can use 
>>> independent of DPH.
>>
>> So we have two vector libraries, vector and uvector, which have a lot 
>> in common - they are both single-dimension array types that support 
>> unboxed instances and have list-like operations with fusion.  They 
>> ought to be unified, really.
>
> It's worse:
>    
> http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/storablevector
>  :-)

What *I* propose is that somebody [you see what I did there?] should sit 
down, take stock of all the multitudes of array libraries, what features 
they have, what obvious features they're missing, and think up a good 
API from scratch. Once we figure out what the best way to arrange all 
this stuff is, *then* we attack the problem of implementing it for real.

It seems lots of people have written really useful code, but we need to 
take a step back and look at the big picture here before writing any 
more of it.

IMHO, anyway...