Sat, 30 Apr 2005 00:00:00 UT

Healthy Subcontinuations

I read the general mailing list of the The Computer Language Shootout Benchmark on alioth.debian.org. It's interesting to see the problems, solutions, and related discussion. There's a lot to learn about benchmarking, though I think I learn more about people.

<hakko> most programmers have a lot of religious issues about their work, yes.

A recent sandbox text is the Health test, it stresses dynamic structures by doing many concurrent mutations on a large tree. Isaac Gouy said it was not immediately obvious to him how it would be implemented in Haskell.
But I had an inspiration, The Zipper is the perfect datastructure! Then just as suddenly, I remembered that the famous Oleg made a post two days ago about the Zipper as a delimited continuation. Also, Simon Marlow has just added SMP support to GHC, so I can use both of the CPUs in my dual Athlon MP with GHC. So now I wonder, can I turn subcontinuations into threads? I'll have to wait for Oleg's second part of Zipper as delimited continuation to find out whether there's an elegant way to do that. If there is, I can likely make an SMP-capable subcontinuation-using implementation of the health benchmark that will be much faster than a naïve implementation. (bit more entertaining too)

In other news, I think that if the sort of solutions described above just naturally occur to me, I probably have the wrong job.