by Sam Westrick, Jatin Arora, and Umut Acar on Jan 13, 2022 | Tags: functional programming, garbage collection, memory management, parallelism
You have heard your grandmother tell you many times: parallel programming is hard. In 2022, does it still have to be? Back in grandma’s heyday, they knew a cool and breezy way to do parallelism: pure functional programming. They knew that pure functions are parallel by default, being free of pesky concurrency bugs and all. But, parallel functional programming remained slow and steady, resisting practical efficiency for decades. This post shows the way towards solving the performance problems of functional programming.
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by Michael Greenberg, Konstantinos Kallas, and Nikos Vasilakis on Oct 12, 2021 | Tags: correctness, distribution, future, HCI, parallelism, research, safety, security, semantics, shell, synthesis, Unix
With about half a century of life, the Unix shell is pervasive and entrenched in our computing infrastructure—with recent virtualization and containerization trends only propelling its use. A fresh surge of academic research highlights show potential for tackling long-standing open problems that are central to the shell and enable further progress. A recent panel discussion at HotOS ’21 concluded that improvements and research on the shell can be impactful and identified several such research directions. Maybe it’s time for your research to be applied to the shell too?
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by Simon Marlow, Simon Peyton Jones, and Satnam Singh on Dec 16, 2019 | Tags: concurrency, functional programming, Haskell, MIP award, parallelism, runtimes
Runtime Support for Multicore Haskell (ICFP’09) was awarded the SIGPLAN ten-year most-influential paper award in 2019. In this blog post we reflect on the journey that led to the paper, and what has happened since.
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