[Haskell] ANNOUNCE: btree-concurrent

[Johan Brinch]

Greetings Haskellers,

We are pleased to announce this new package, featuring a concurrent
b-tree developed as part of our master's thesis on backup systems. The
package features code related to STM, caching, QuickCheck and of
course concurrency and parallelism.

And it's also on Hackage:
http://hackage.haskell.org/package/btree-concurrent

In case the build fails on Hackage and the documentation doesn't work,
it's also available here:
http://hindsight.dk/doc/html/btree-concurrent


Credits to Thomas Conway of Melbourne University, for discussions
related to the implementation, and to our supervisor Ken Friis Larsen
of University of Copenhagen.


And now, the description of the package:
=====

A backend agnostic, concurrent BTree with relaxed balance[1] written
in Haskell using a mix of IO operations and pure STM.

Although the code does work, it is neither production-ready nor complete.

Features include:
* Caching: While nodes are periodically saved on persistent storage
(e.g. disk) they are cached in-memory during operations.

* Live flushing: It is possible to save the current version of the
tree to disk and run modifying operations at the same time. The nodes
are updated buttom-up to ensure a valid tree in the case of a crash.

* Backend agnosticism: A simple API is used as an abstraction for the
persistent storage.

* Verification: The test-suite uses QuickCheck to compare the trees
behaviour to that of Data.Map.

Deficients include:
* Memory greedy. Nodes are not stored in a compact fashion and are
constantly being serialised/deserialised.

* findMin and findMax are incomplete and may fail (see the TODO for details).

* The implementation does not parallelise well.


[1] B-trees with relaxed balance, K. S. Larsen & R. Fagerberg,
Parallel Processing Symposium, 1995. Proceedings., 9th International

-- 
Johan Brinch & Morten Brøns-Pedersen