Parallel and Concurrent Programming in Haskell

Preface

As one of the developers of the Glasgow Haskell Compiler (GHC) for almost 15 years, I have seen Haskell grow from a niche research language into a rich and thriving ecosystem. I spent a lot of that time working on GHC’s support for parallelism and concurrency. One of the first things I did to GHC in 1997 was to rewrite its runtime system, and a key decision we made at that time was to build concurrency right into the core of the system rather than making it an optional extra or an add-on library. I like to think this decision was founded upon shrewd foresight, but in reality it had as much to do with the fact that we found a way to reduce the overhead of concurrency to near zero (previously it had been on the order of 2%; we’ve always been performance-obsessed). Nevertheless, having concurrency be non-optional meant that it was always a first-class part of the implementation, and I’m sure that this decision was instrumental in bringing about GHC’s solid and lightning-fast concurrency support.

Haskell has a long tradition of being associated with parallelism. To name just a few of the projects, there was the pH variant of Haskell derived from the Id language, which was designed for parallelism, the GUM system for running parallel Haskell programs on multiple machines in a cluster, and the GRiP system: a complete computer architecture designed for running parallel functional programs. All of these happened well before the current multicore revolution, and the problem was that ...