Another Word For It Patrick Durusau on Topic Maps and Semantic Diversity

March 30, 2013

Parallel and Concurrent Programming in Haskell

Filed under: Concurrent Programming,Haskell,Parallel Programming — Patrick Durusau @ 6:48 pm

Parallel and Concurrent Programming in Haskell by Simon Marlow.

From the introduction:

While most programming languages nowadays provide some form of concurrent or parallel programming facilities, very few provide as wide a range as Haskell. Haskell prides itself on having the right tool for the job, for as many jobs as possible. If a job is discovered for which there isn’t already a good tool, Haskell’s typical response is to invent a new tool. Haskell’s abstraction facilities provide a fertile ground on which to experiment with different programming idioms, and that is exactly what has happened in the space of concurrent and parallel programming.

Is this a good or a bad thing? You certainly can get away with just one way of writing concurrent programs: threads and locks are in principle all you need. But as the programming community has begun to realise over the last few years, threads and locks are not the right tool for most jobs. Programming with them requires a high degree of expertise even for simple tasks, and leads to programs that have hard-to-diagnose faults.

So in Haskell we embrace the idea that different problems require different tools, and we provide the programmer with a rich selection to choose from. The inevitable downside is that there is a lot to learn, and that is what this book is all about.

In this book I will discuss how to write parallel and concurrent programs in Haskell, ranging from the simple uses of parallelism to speed up computation-heavy programs, to the use of lightweight threads for writing high-speed concurrent network servers. Along the way we’ll see how to use Haskell to write programs that run on the powerful processor in a modern graphics card (GPU), and to write programs that can run on multiple machines in a network (distributed programming).

In O’Reilly’s Open Feedback Publishing System.

If you really want to learn something, write a book about it, edit a book about it or teach a class about it.

Here’s your chance for #2.

Read carefully!

I first saw this in Christophe Lalanne’s A bag of tweets / March 2013.

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