Concurrency in Haskell: Fast, Simple, Correct

After nearly a decade of building embedded systems in C, C++, and Rust, I’ve somehow ended up writing Haskell for a living. If you’d asked me about functional programming a few years ago, I would have told you it was self-indulgent academic baloney—and then I stumbled into people using it for real-time systems where microseconds can mean literal life or death. I’m too old to try to convince people what tools they should use, but Haskell has some features that might interest anyone who cares about fast, correct code. Let’s talk about them. We’ll start with concurrency. Some people, when confronted with a problem, think, “I know, I’ll use regular expressions.” Now they have two problems. —Jamie Zawinski Some people, when confronted with a problem, think, “I know, I’ll use threads,” and then two they hav erpoblesms. —Ned Batchelder Like we’ve previously discussed, we have two main concerns when going fast: Your computer (even the one in your pocket) has many cores. To use the ... Read full article.