Monday, July 23, 2012

More electronic ink on ParaSail

Another nice article on ParaSail just came out, in the on-line journal EEJournal:

    http://www.eejournal.com/archives/articles/20120718-language/

This article came out of a very pleasant interview over lunch at a Paris bistro with Dick Selwood, one of the EEJournal editors.  So imagine a discussion of ParaSail while we multitasked over bread, cheese, and red wine... ;-)

2 comments:

  1. Just found ParaSail as a result of this article. It looks fascinating! Do I detect an influence from Cilk?

    I'm designing a language called Noether which is similar in some respects. Will have more questions soon!

    -- David-Sarah Hopwood

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  2. ParaSail definitely borrows the "work-stealing" approach from Cilk (and a bunch of other ideas from a lot of other interesting languages).

    I would say the thing that makes ParaSail itself interesting is what has been eliminated from ParaSail, while it remains a pleasant, flexible, productive language.

    Some of the specific differences between ParaSail and Cilk include: the programmer doesn't have to specify "spawn" -- the language is designed to make it safe to parallelize any expression, and the compiler uses heuristics to decide where to insert implicit "spawns"; pointers and a global heap are eliminated in favor of expandable and shrinkable objects using region-based storage management; run-time exceptions are eliminated in favor of advanced compile-time static analysis.

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