Things I Learned from ACCU 2010

[Petr Kalny]

On Fri, 23 Apr 2010 15:23:22 +0200, Walter Bright  
<newshound1 at digitalmars.com> wrote:

> bearophile wrote:
>> Walter Bright:
>>> OCaml has a global interpreter lock which explains its behavior.  
>>> Russell
>>> didn't know why the Haskell behavior was so bad. He allowed that it was
>>> possible he was misusing it.
>>  You have just the illusion to have learned something about this.  
>> Trying to
>> read too much from this single example is very wrong. A single  
>> benchmark,
>> written by a person not expert in the language, means nearly nothing.  
>> You
>> need at least a suite of good benchmarks, written by people that know  
>> the
>> respective languages. And even then, you have just an idea of the  
>> situation.
>
>
> Fair enough, but in order to dismiss the results I'd need to know *why*  
> the Haskell version failed so badly, and why such a straightforward  
> attempt at parallelism is the wrong solution for Haskell.
>
> You shouldn't have to be an expert in a language that is supposedly good  
> at parallelism in order to get good results from it.
>
> (Russel may or not be an expert, but he is certainly not a novice at FP  
> or parallelism.)
>
> Basically, I'd welcome an explanatory riposte to Russel's results.

IIRC Haskell's problems with concurrency have roots in its 100% lazy  
evaluation.

Anyone wanting more details may find this page useful:

http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Research_papers/Parallelism_and_concurrency

Petr