|
![](/i/fill.gif) |
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
|
![](/i/fill.gif) |