[Haskell-cafe] Seen on reddit: or, foldl and foldr considered slightly harmful

[Thomas Girod]

Isn't it the kind of things Data Parallel Haskell is achieving ? I'm in
no way an expert of the field, but from what I've read on the subject it
looked like :

I have a list of N elements and I want to map the function F on it.
technically, I could spawn N processes and build the result from that,
but it would be highly inefficient. So the really hard part is to guess
how I should split my data to get the best performances.

Well, I guess it's pretty easy for a flat structure if you have access
to it's length, but for a recursive one it is complicated as you don't
know if a branch of the tree will lead to a leaf or a huge subtree ...
the "evil detail" !

Tom


On Thu, Feb 11, 2010 at 11:00:51AM +0100, Ketil Malde wrote:
> Johann Höchtl <johann.hoechtl at gmail.com> writes:
> 
> > In a presentation of Guy Steele for ICFP 2009 in Edinburgh:
> > http://www.vimeo.com/6624203
> > he "considers foldl and foldr" harmful as they hinder parallelism
> > because of "Process first element, then the rest" Instead he proposes
> > a divide and merge aproach, especially in the light of going parallel.
> 
> In Haskell foldl/foldr apply to linked lists (or lazy streams, if you
> prefer) which are already inherently sequential, and gets a rather harsh
> treatment.  I notice he points to finger trees, which I though was
> implemented in Data.Sequence.
> 
> > are somewhat  geared towards Fortress, but I wonder what Haskellers
> > have to say about his position.
> 
> Can we (easily) parallelize operations on Data.Sequence?  Often, the
> devil is in the details, and there's a lot of ground to cover between
> 'trees are easier to parallelize' to an efficient and effective high
> level interface.  (E.g. non-strict semantics allowing speculative
> evalutaion - you still need to insert manual `par`s, right?)
> 
> -k
> -- 
> If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants
> _______________________________________________
> Haskell-Cafe mailing list
> Haskell-Cafe at haskell.org
> http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe