diff options
Diffstat (limited to 'docs/users_guide/exts/parallel.rst')
| -rw-r--r-- | docs/users_guide/exts/parallel.rst | 31 |
1 files changed, 31 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/docs/users_guide/exts/parallel.rst b/docs/users_guide/exts/parallel.rst new file mode 100644 index 0000000000..c8348db507 --- /dev/null +++ b/docs/users_guide/exts/parallel.rst @@ -0,0 +1,31 @@ +.. _lang-parallel: + +Parallel and Concurrent +======================= + +.. index:: + single: parallelism + single: concurrency + +GHC implements some major extensions to Haskell to support concurrent +and parallel programming. Let us first establish terminology: + +- *Parallelism* means running a Haskell program on multiple processors, + with the goal of improving performance. Ideally, this should be done + invisibly, and with no semantic changes. + +- *Concurrency* means implementing a program by using multiple + I/O-performing threads. While a concurrent Haskell program *can* run + on a parallel machine, the primary goal of using concurrency is not + to gain performance, but rather because that is the simplest and most + direct way to write the program. Since the threads perform I/O, the + semantics of the program is necessarily non-deterministic. + +GHC supports both concurrency and parallelism. + +.. toctree:: + :maxdepth: 1 + + concurrent + stm + static_pointers |