[Haskell-cafe] Dynamic thread management?

[Andrew Coppin]

Brian Hurt wrote:
> The key idea of Cilk is that it's easier to deparallelize than it is 
> to parallelize, especially automatically.  So the idea is that the 
> program is written incredibly parallel, with huge numbers of 
> microthreads, which are (on average) very cheap to spawn.  The runtime 
> then deparallelizes the microthreads, running multiple microthreads 
> sequentially within a single real thread (a worker thread).  
> Microthreads that live their entire life within a single real thread 
> are cheap to spawn (as in "not much more expensive than a normal 
> function call" cheap).

That's so absurd, it might even work!

I quite like the concept though - rather than asking "what can we make 
parallel?", you say "what should we do serially?" That sounds like an 
easier question to answer...