Things I Learned from ACCU 2010

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

On 04/29/2010 06:03 AM, Petr Kalny wrote:
> 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

Which specific papers are you referring to?

BTW, I wonder how current the page is. It features no paper from 2009 or 
2010, one from 2008, none from 2007, and six from 2006. Of those, three 
links are broken.


Andrei