[Haskell-cafe] Re: Python's big challenges, Haskell's big advantages?

[Brandon S. Allbery KF8NH]

On Sep 18, 2008, at 15:10 , Manlio Perillo wrote:
>> Allocation areas are per-CPU, not per-thread.  A Concurrent Haskell  
>> thread consists of a TSO (thread state object, currently 11 machine  
>> words), and a stack, which we currently start with 1KB and grow on  
>> demand.
>
> How is this implemented?
>
> I have seen some coroutine implementations in C, using functions  
> from ucontext.h (or direct asm code), but all have the problem that  
> the allocated stack is fixed.


That's because it's much easier to use a fixed stack.

There are two ways to handle a growable stack; both start with  
allocating each stack in a separate part of the address space with  
room to grow it downward.  The simpler way uses stack probes on  
function entry to detect impending stack overflow.  The harder (and  
less portable) one involves trapping page faults ("segmentation  
violation" on POSIX), enlarging the stack, and restarting the  
instruction that caused the trap; this requires fairly detailed  
knowledge of the CPU and the way signals or page faults are handled by  
the OS.  (There's also a hybrid which many POSIXish systems use,  
trapping the page fault specifically when running the stack probe; the  
probe is designed to be safe to either restart or ignore, so it can be  
handled more portably.)

-- 
brandon s. allbery [solaris,freebsd,perl,pugs,haskell] allbery at kf8nh.com
system administrator [openafs,heimdal,too many hats] allbery at ece.cmu.edu
electrical and computer engineering, carnegie mellon university    KF8NH