Implementing lazy functional languages on stock hardware: the Spineless Tagless G-machine

Abstract

The Spineless Tagless G-machine is an abstract machine designed to support non-strict higher-order functional languages. This presentation of the machine falls into three parts. Firstly, we give a general discussion of the design issues involved in implementing non-strict functional languages. Next, we present the STG language, an austere but recognizably-functional language, which as well as a denotational meaning has a well-defined operational semantics. The STG language is the ‘abstract machine code’ for the Spineless Tagless G-machine. Lastly, we discuss the mapping of the STG language onto stock hardware. The success of an abstract machine model depends largely on how efficient this mapping can be made, though this topic is often relegated to a short section. Instead, we give a detailed discussion of the design issues and the choices we have made. Our principal target is the C language, treating the C compiler as a portable assembler.

Eden – Parallel Functional Programming with Haskell

“…In principle, it shares its parallel runtime system (PRTS) with Glasgow parallel Haskell [58] but due to the disjoint address spaces of its processes does not need to implement a virtual shared memory and global garbage collection in contrast to GpH. In the following, we abstract from low-level implementation details like graph reduction and thread management which are explained elsewhere [47,58,14,34] and describe Eden's implementation on top of the module This module provides primitive monadic operations which are used to implement the Eden constructs on a higher-level of abstraction [10]. …”

High-Level Process Control in Eden

“…The primitive operations implement basic actions which have to be performed directly in the runtime system of the underlying sequential compiler GHC 3 . In the Eden module, every primitive operation is wrapped in In the following, we abstract from low-level implementation details like graph reduction and thread management which are well-understood and explained elsewhere [12,19,2]. Instead we focus on coordination aspects, in particular process abstractions and process instantiations and their implementation in the Eden module.…”

Experiences in teaching large scale functional programming

“…A large amount of time has been spent proling the system with both the Glasgow cost centre proler [10], part of GHC, and also the York heap proler [12] [13], supplied with the Chalmers haskell compiler. Improvements to the overall system achieved through the use of the prolers have been in the order of 35%.…”