[Haskell-cafe] Re: Memory and Threads - MVars or TVars

Eitan Goldshtrom thesourceofx at gmail.com
Wed Jul 28 21:31:32 EDT 2010


I can't believe I never knew about Cabal. I'm getting Orc now. It looks 
very interesting. Thanks for the help.

-Eitan

On 7/28/2010 9:17 PM, Günther Schmidt wrote:
> Hi Eitan,
>
> I'm right now approaching the subject of concurrency myself for the 
> first time in an application that spiders web pages.
> The getting the web pages part via http request is the one that is 
> time consuming and thus the one that I wish to "concurrentalize", ie. 
> getting up to 6 six pages concurrently at a time.
>
> From what I've learned so far it seems that there are the following 
> approaches to concurrency in haskell:
>
> 1. use a primitive approach with the concurrency primitives that 
> haskell / ghc provides, ie. locks, MVars, TVars etc. directly
>
> 2. use one abstraction level up, ie. use STM (Software Transactional 
> Memory), there is a chapter in RWH about it.(also available online).
>
> 3. use yet another abstraction level up by using the orc library from 
> the galois people, available on hackage. Documentation to this one is 
> a paper available on the galois website. I am currently at the very 
> beginning of familiarizing myself with this approach but it seems the 
> most feasible way to do concurrency. Using this approach is pretty 
> much like not having to worry about garbage collection. Even using STM 
> you still have to do a lot of your own manual forkIO, putVar, kill etc.
>
> Best regards
>
> Günther
>
>
> Am 29.07.10 02:23, schrieb Eitan Goldshtrom:
>> Hi everyone. I was wondering if someone could just guide me toward some
>> good information, but if anyone wants to help with a personal
>> explanation I welcome it. I'm trying to write a threaded program and I'm
>> not sure how to manage my memory. I read up on MVars and they make a lot
>> of sense. My real question is what is "atomic" and how does it apply to
>> TVars? I don't understand what atomic transactions are and I can't seem
>> to find a concise explanation. I also saw some stuff about TMVars? But I
>> can't find much on them either. Any help would be appreciated.
>>
>> -Eitan
>>
>>
>>
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