Haskell provides several mechanisms to support concurrency and parallelism, allowing for efficient and scalable execution of concurrent and parallel computations. Here are the main approaches Haskell offers:
1. Lightweight Concurrency : * Haskell offers lightweight threads, also known as "green threads," which are managed within the Haskell runtime system. These threads are lightweight in terms of memory usage and context switching overhead.
* The `
Control.Concurrent
` module provides functions for creating and managing lightweight threads in Haskell.
* Lightweight threads allow you to write concurrent programs that can perform multiple tasks concurrently, making it easier to write highly concurrent applications.
2. Software Transactional Memory (STM) : * Haskell provides built-in support for Software Transactional Memory (STM), a concurrency control mechanism that simplifies concurrent programming.
* STM allows you to define atomic blocks of code that can perform multiple memory operations atomically. This helps avoid common concurrency issues like race conditions and deadlocks.
* The `
Control.Concurrent.STM
` module provides functions and types for working with STM in Haskell.
3. Parallelism using `par` and `pseq` : * Haskell supports explicit parallelism through the use of the `
par
` and `
pseq
` combinators.
* `par` allows you to express potential parallelism by specifying that a computation can be evaluated in parallel with another computation.
* `pseq` enforces sequential evaluation, ensuring that one computation is completed before another.
* These combinators help in expressing fine-grained parallelism and controlling the evaluation order of computations.
4. Parallel Strategies : * Haskell provides the `
Control.Parallel.Strategies
` module, which offers higher-level constructs for expressing parallelism and controlling evaluation strategies.
* Strategies allow you to define how computations should be evaluated in parallel and provide control over workload distribution and granularity.
* Strategies can be applied to lists, data structures, and computations to express parallelism more conveniently.
5. Concurrency and Parallelism Libraries : - Haskell has a rich ecosystem of libraries for concurrency and parallelism, such as `
async
`, `
conduit
`, and `
pipes
`, which provide additional abstractions and utilities for managing concurrent and parallel computations.