[Haskell-cafe] Bulk Synchronous Parallel

[Thomas Horstmeyer]

Hi Aaron,

On 21.04.2010 20:29, Aaron D. Ball wrote:
 > Unfortunately, Eden is one of the examples I had in mind when
 > referring to distributed Haskell projects as overly complicated and
 > [for practical purposes] dead.  Their last release available for
 > download was in 2006.  Their beta is "available upon request", which
 > doesn't raise my confidence in the level of active development or
 > openness of the project.
 >
You're partly right. The development of the Eden system itself has been 
neglected for a time. Mostly because Jost Berthold (the main system 
programmer) finished his PhD and left Marburg (and has only limited 
spare time with his new job). The remaining members of the Eden group 
here were mostly language users and language developers, not system 
implementors. No one really opted to take over responsibility...
However, this is changing right now. We are actively merging the Eden 
runtime and that of the GpH language (as both need basically the same 
features) to get a new runtime based on GHC 6.12 (and GHC HEAD). This 
runtime, while still in beta state, is already usable. However, building 
it is currently still a bit too complicated to bother end users with it. 
So, if your "complicated" is referring to this, you are right. We hope 
to simplify this and to have a usable release in the near future. If 
your "complicated" was targetting the use of the Eden language itself, 
however, I object!


 >
 >> They just had a hackathon in St Andrews,
 >>
 >>     http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/HackPar
 >
 > they don't seem to have even a source code repository yet, and they
 > appear to be bogged down in that complexity I mentioned.
 >
Of course, a source code repository for Eden always existed. The new 
repository was meant for the merged version of Eden/GpH. And that exists 
as well. The Eden webpage will be updated as soon as we have a 
pre-release of the 6.12 branch.


Best regards,
Thomas Horstmeyer (Eden group Marburg)