Lightweight concurrency: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 11:37, 7 March 2012

This page contains information about the design, implementation, problems and potential solutions for building user-level concurrency primitives in GHC.

Introdution

All of GHC's concurrency primitives are written in C code and is baked in as a part of the RTS. This precludes extensibility as well as making it difficult to maintain. Ideally, the concurrency libraries will be implemented completely in Haskell code, over a small subset of primitive operations provided by the RTS. This will provide a Haskell programmer the ability to build custom schedulers and concurrency libraries. For an earlier attempt at this problem, please look at Peng Li's paper [1].

Substrate primitives

Substrate primitives are the primitives exposed by the RTS, on top of which user-level concurreny libraries are built.

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 All of GHC's [[Concurrency|concurrency primitives]] are written in C code and is baked in as a part of the RTS. This precludes extensibility as well as making it difficult to maintain. Ideally, the concurrency libraries will be implemented completely in Haskell code, over a small subset of primitive operations provided by the RTS. This will provide a Haskell programmer the ability to build custom schedulers and concurrency libraries. For an earlier attempt at this problem, please look at Peng Li's paper [http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/simonpj/papers/lw-conc/index.htm].
+== Substrate primitives ==
+Substrate primitives are the primitives exposed by the RTS, on top of which user-level concurreny libraries are built.
+<haskell>
+</haskell>