[Haskell-cafe] Concurrent with monads

[John Lato]

>
> From: Jiansen He <jiansenhe at googlemail.com>
>
> Hi cafe,
>
> I wounder if it is possible to tell a haskell system that two computations
> with side effects could be executed concurrently.
>
> Here is an affected example:
>
> Suppose two people want to compare their age, but do not want to leak their
> personal information.  The following program reads one person's age after
> another then send back compared result.
>
> age :: IO ()
> age  = do
>  i <- readIntFrom a
>  j <- readIntFrom b
>  writeTo a (i-j)
>  writeTo b (j-i)
>
> How can I express the fact that two readings could be carried out in any
> order?


The best approach is probably to fork a thread for each concurrent
evaluation.  There are a few packages on Hackage that can help with this;
I've used threads[1] and spawn[2] successfully.

If the "readIntFrom" function is meant to be responding to a client, a
threaded model may make sense organizationally, but for this to be a
performance benefit there needs to be sufficient work for each thread to
carry out.  Haskell threads are lighter than Posix threads, but there's
still overhead involved.

There is an alternative I hesitate to mention because it involves some
voodoo, but Roman Leshchinskiy came up with a clever technique that might be
appropriate if you want the behavior of "par" but for IO[3].

[1] http://hackage.haskell.org/package/threads
[2] http://hackage.haskell.org/package/spawn
[3] http://unlines.wordpress.com/2010/04/21/sparking-imperatives/
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