Lightweight concurrency primitives for GHC

The Glasgow Haskell Compiler (GHC) has quite sophisticated support for concurrency in its runtime system, which is written in lowlevel C code. As GHC evolves, the runtime system becomes increasingly complex, error-prone, difficult to maintain and difficult to add new concurrency features. This paper presents an alternative approach to implement concurrency in GHC. Rather than hard-wiring all kinds of concurrency features, the runtime system is a thin substrate providing only a small set of concurrency primitives, and the remaining concurrency features are implemented in software libraries written in Haskell. This design improves the safety of concurrency support; it also provides more customizability of concurrency features, which can be developed as Haskell library packages and deployed modularly.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: HASKELL
• Authors: Peng Li, Simon Marlow, Simon L. Peyton Jones, Andrew P. Tolmach
• Keywords: Concurrency Features, Concurrency Primitives, Glasgow Haskell Compiler, HASKELL 2007, Programming Languages