[MLton] Parallel Runtime System

[Eric McCorkle]

On Jun 16, 2007, at 6:03 PM, Stephen Weeks wrote:

>> > Sounds like a cool project.  One tough problem is making 'portable'
>> > runtime systems -- in the implementation of a high-level  
>> language, the
>> > compiler and runtime system are usually tightly integrated.
>>
>> Felix is portable (all of it).
>
> I think you missed Matthew's meaning of "portable" -- he meant a
> runtime portable across compilers (i.e. the runtime's clients), not
> across platforms the runtime runs on.

That was my point.  Ideally, it would be a runtime system that is  
easy for a compiler to target (or at least for a compiler that thinks  
the way most modern functional language compilers do).  Ideally it'd  
be something that other compilers could target.  I can't imagine a  
parallel runtime system for something like Haskell or Erlang (or even  
non-functional typesafe languages like Cyclone or Java) being  
terribly different from one for ML, at least at a distance.  Encoding  
type information is probably the hardest part of the interface, but  
even this would be a non-issue if typed assembly languages became  
common and some standard format was adopted.

The real trouble will come from very nitpicky incompatibilities and  
issues between different compilers I imagine (for example, the 16- 
byte C stack alignment issue that was the trouble with Intel Darwin  
MLton or some similar wierdness)

-- 
Eric McCorkle
Brown University
CS Graduate Student



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