[Swift-devel] Functional building blocks as concurrency patterns

[Ian Foster]

Ben:

I've often wondered about developing a mapper that can deal with  
infinite/unbounded streams.

Your note reminds me of how I keep wondering whether we should be  
doing one of two things:

a) Adopting/adapting some existing functional scripting system to  
leverage their investment in compilers, etc.--an investment that is  
for us hard to sustain.

b) Moving away from a language to a library, which will be clunkier  
and more error prone, but also avoids us having to maintain compilers,  
etc.

Regarding nondeterminism--do we have use cases for this?

Ian.


On Nov 29, 2008, at 4:45 PM, Ben Clifford wrote:

>
> This just appeared on lambda-the-ultimate:
>
> http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/3108
>
>> While teaching INGI1131, my concurrent programming course, I have  
>> become
>> even more impressed by a concurrent paradigm, namely functional
>> programming extended with threads and ports, which I call multi-agent
>> dataflow programming.
>
> Some ofthe concepts overlap or are closely related to SwiftScript  
> and so
> some of the discussion on that post is interesting to skim.
>
> Some differences are that:
>
> * we don't have infinite/unbounded streams of data because of the  
> way that
> our mappers work at the moment (though it conceptually fits in with
> SwiftScript); and
>
> * we don't have ports (or some other way of introducing non- 
> determininism
> in the language itself) - we do have something similar at the  
> execution
> layer, though, in the form of job replication, where we allow two job
> submissions to race to start execution and only keep the one that  
> starts
> executing (some day it might be desirable to extend this to the one  
> that
> finishes first or some other more complex expression, but I don't  
> see need
> at the moment)
>
> -- 
>
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