[Haskell-cafe] Evaluating parallel computations in order of finishing (approximately)

[Edward Amsden]

Conal Elliot did something like this for his FRP system in the paper
Push-Pull Functional Reactive Programming [1]. It involved a hack in
which unsafePerformIO was used to spawn two threads to evaluate two
events for occurrences, and return whichever returned first.

Recall though, that monads aren't magic (despite frequent appearances
to the contrary.) They are just functional structures that have to
obey all of the normal restrictions of a pure functional language,
including referential transparency. The entire point of Haskell's
parallelism constructs is to make the returned values independent of
parallel evaluation order. You're not going to escape that by using a
monad, unless its one like IO which exists to order side-effects and
isolate them in the type system.


[1] http://conal.net/papers/push-pull-frp/


On Mon, Feb 6, 2012 at 5:46 PM, Victor Miller <victorsmiller at gmail.com> wrote:
> Suppose that we have a list [a] of computations that we want to evaluate in
> parallel.  I would like to have something (probably a monad) which would
> return the list in order (roughly) of finishing:
>
> Say the monad is M.  It would be something like the state monad, in that it
> would be implemented by a state transformer function.  In this case the
> state would the set of computations to be evaluated.
>
> we might have a function
>
>
> include :: [a] -> M a ()
>
> which would say that the monad's responsibility would be to evaluate all the
> members of a in parallel.  We might also have a function
>
> strategy :: Strategy -> M a ()
>
> which would indicate the parallel strategy to be used.
>
> The key thing would be function, completed, which produces a list of all the
> computations to be evaluated as a list roughly in order of completion.
>
> That is, if, inside the M monad we finished the do with
>
> completed
>
> then we would have a value M a [a]
>
> which would be the list in order of completion.
>
> Since everything is lazy we could ask for the head of the list, and it would
> be the first value whose computation finished.
>
> Does such a thing exist?
>
>
> Victor
>
>
>
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-- 
Edward Amsden
Student
Computer Science
Rochester Institute of Technology
www.edwardamsden.com