[Haskell-cafe] Imagining a G-machine

Neil Mitchell ndmitchell at gmail.com
Wed May 16 19:17:55 EDT 2007


Hi

> It is worded as biotech but may as
> well be molecular computing or nanotech.

biotech machines tend to be inaccurate, but highly parallel.
Unfortunately the G machine is very un-parallel and requires 100%
precision. Things like speculative evaluation may be more interesting.

> To add garbage collection, roots send out a periodic (or sustained)
> signal to all connected nodes. Nodes receiving the signal do not
> self-destruct. Nodes not receiving the signal invokes their built-in
> self-destruct mechanism to dissolve themselves back into nutrients.
> There may be better schemes.

I think that in a novel machine you aren't going to want to do the
traditional methods of garbage collection, or anything else. You'll
probably need entirely new methods of doing entirely new things.

> Debugging can be done by making evaluators send radio signals concerning
> operations they perform; then a second computer can log these and you
> can review them. You can also use radio signals to instruct the
> evaluators to perform unusual operations on demand.

It would also be a shame if for the G'-machine we have excellent
debugging capabilities, but for normal Haskell on a normal computer
we're stuck with Debug.Trace...

Thanks

Neil


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