Keynote 2: Towards Haskell in the cloud
Simon Peyton-Jones (Microsoft Research, Cambridge, England)
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/simonpj/
Abstract: Haskell is a great language for writing parallel applications, but
until now "parallel" has always meant "shared memory". The obvious
paradigm for cloud applications in Haskell is actor-style concurrency
based on message passing; Erlang is the brand leader here.
In this talk I'll describe how we've implemented an Erlang-style
concurrency library in Haskell. Of course this isn't a new idea: Scala
Actors and Akka do something very similar in Scala, although there are
some interesting differences in the details. More fundamentally, we
have not done this before in Haskell because of a key obstacle, namely
serialising arbitrary closures. The main technical contribution of
the talk is an elegant way to solve this problem, exploiting (yet
again) the type system to good effect.