POV-Ray : Newsgroups : povray.off-topic : Time is not free : Time is not free Server Time
3 Sep 2024 15:15:46 EDT (-0400)
  Time is not free  
From: Invisible
Date: 11 Nov 2010 09:41:25
Message: <4cdc0095$1@news.povray.org>
http://www.haskell.org/communities/11-2010/html/report.html

Well, there goes the rest of my week...

So far I've already read about all manner of crazy stuff:

+ GHC 7.0 is in development, featuring more new bells & whistles than is 
sane for any one system to have.
   - The "Jenga" of the type checker has been replaced.
   - Improvements to the inliner yield 80% speedups in some cases.
   - There's a new LLVM backend.
   - There's a new, faster I/O subsystem.
   - A long-standing glitch with Parallel Strategies has been fixed. 
(And in the process tonnes of new functionality is available.)
   - There's work on improving numerical performance (finally!)
   - I read a paper where somebody benchmarked the standard containers 
library and managed to make it go about 25% faster.
   - We might finally get concurrent GC too.
   - Microsoft Research is funding further development of Haskell's 
parallel capabilities. (!) There's some talk of an MPI binding.
   - There's more DPH improvements.
   - Tonnes of other stuff too small to mention.
+ UHC (the Utrecht University compiler for Haskell) contains a bunch of 
interesting stuff. Most particularly, they're using an interesting 
Attribute Grammar for performing tree transformations. It turns out this 
is simpler and easier than writing the transformations in Haskell - 
which is rather surprising, given how good Haskell is at data 
transformations...
+ There's a big long paper about The Reduceron. It's basically an FPGA 
processor for running Haskell (or something like it).
   - First there's a great long section where they explain their design 
decisions and various theoretical benchmark results.
   - Then they describe the actual design of the hardware, and the 
various decisions they chose there, and what the final thing looks like.
   - Finally they measure the performance of the thing. And it's not too 
shabby. A program running on the Reduceron is about 4x slower than the 
same program compiled with GHC and running on an Intel Core 2 Duo at 
3GHz. Which is very, very impressive when you consider that the 
Reduceron runs at a piffling 96MHz. (!) On the other hand, no 
floating-point support yet...

God only knows what I'll find when I scroll down further...


Post a reply to this message

Copyright 2003-2023 Persistence of Vision Raytracer Pty. Ltd.