Purely functional arrays are notoriously difficult to implement and use efficiently due to the absence of destructive updates and the resultant frequent copying. Deforestation frameworks such as stream fusion achieve signficant improvements here but fail for a number of important operations which can nevertheless benefit from elimination of temporaries. To mitigate this problem, we extend stream fusion with support for in-place execution of array operations. This optimisation, which we call recycling, is easy to implement and can significantly reduce array allocation and copying in purely functional array algorithms.
[TIMe - eMBEdded - Reactive] Timber is a general programming language specifically aimed at the construction of complex event-driven systems. It allows programs to be conveniently structured in terms of objects and reactions, and the real-time behavior of reactions can furthermore be precisely controlled via platform-independent timing constraints. This property makes Timber particularly suited to both the specification and the implementation of real-time embedded systems. Timber is deeply rooted in the functional programming tradition, although it also draws heavily on object-oriented concepts, and has the notion of concurrent execution built into its core.
Datatype-Generic Programming Roland Backhouse at the University of Nottingham and Jeremy Gibbons at the University of Oxford have a joint EPSRC-supported project entitled Datatype-Generic Programming, running for three years and starting on 1st October 2003. Aim The project is to develop a novel mechanism for parametrizing programs, namely parametrization by a datatype or type constructor. The mechanism is related to parametric polymorphism, but of higher order. We aim to develop a calculus for constructing datatype-generic programs, with the ultimate goal of improving the state of the art in generic object-oriented programming, as occurs for example in the C++ Standard Template Library. further details of the project can be obtained from the contacts listed below.
We have designed, implemented, and evaluated AtomCaml, an extension to Objective Caml that provides a synchronization primitive for atomic (transactional) execution of code. A first-class primitive function of type (unit->'a)->'a evaluates its argument (which may call other functions, even external C functions) as though no other thread has interleaved execution. Our design ensures fair scheduling and obstruction-freedom. Our implementation extends the Objective Caml bytecode compiler and run-time system to support atomicity. A logging-and-rollback approach lets us undo uncompleted atomic blocks upon thread pre-emption, and retry them when the thread is rescheduled. The mostly functional nature of the Caml language and the Objective Caml implementation's commitment to a uniprocessor execution model (i.e., threads are interleaved, not executed simultaneously) allow particularly efficient logging.