Ben wrote:
perhaps it is too late to suggest things for GSOC --
but stephen tetley on a different thread pointed at aaron turon's
work, which there's a very interesting new concurrency framework he
calls "reagents" which seems to give the best of all worlds : it is
declarative and compositional like STM, but gives performance akin to
hand-coded lock-free data structures. he seems to have straddled the
duality of isolation vs message-passing nicely, and can subsume
things like actors and the join calculus.
http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/turon/reagents.pdf
he has a BSD licensed library in scala at
https://github.com/aturon/ChemistrySet
if someone doesn't want to pick this up for GSOC i might have a hand
at implementing it myself.
That looks great! While I didn't take the time to understand the
concurrency model in detail, the overall idea is to use arrows that can
be run atomically
runAtomically :: Reagent a b -> (a -> IO b)
This is very similar to STM: combining computations within the
monad/arrow is atomic while combining computations "outside" the
monad/arrow can interleave them.
runAtomically (f . g) -- atomic
runAtomically f . runAtomically g -- interleaving
Actually, it turns out that the Reagent arrow is also a monad, but the
author seems to claim that the "static" arrow style enables certain
optimizations. I haven't checked his model in detail to see whether this
is really the case and how exactly it differs from STM, but we know that
situations like this happen for parser combinators. Maybe it's enough to
recast reagents as an applicative functor?
To summarize: the way I understand it is that it's apparently possible
to improve the STM monad by turning it into an arrow. (I refer to "STM"
in a very liberal sense here: whether memory is transactional or not is
unimportant, the only thing that matters is a computation that composes
atomically.)
Best regards,
Heinrich Apfelmus
--
http://apfelmus.nfshost.com
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