I am kind of between projects right now so I am wondering what I should do next. I really like functional programming, and in particular languages like Erlang, Haskell and F#. So I started to wonder if I should make an Erlang compiler for the .NET runtime.
I like Erlang for a number of reasons: It is simple, it is a functional programming language, the language is designed around the actor-model for interprocess (Erlang processes that is) communication, a system written in Erlang is very robust, and creating computing clusters and high-availability servers is almost too easy.
So if I am about to start making an implementation of Erlang for the .NET platform there are a few obstacles and questions that needs to be addressed first:
(more…)
In this small article I will show you how you can use the power of functional programming to write data structures for parallel processing that scales well on any number of cores.
What is one of the primary concerns for programmers right now? Writing high performance code that scales well regardless of whether the software is running on a CPU with one, two or 1000 cores.
Todays software does not scale well, and one of the major obstacles is making it run efficiently on multiple cores without encountering the problems that are bound to arise when programming with multiple threads. When dealing with parallel processing data parallelism is a great tool to accomplish the goal of writing highly scalable software.
In functional programming a list is one of the most fundamental data structures you can find. Furthermore it is also great for – say – iterating, and it is very easy to make parallel. I will show you a few examples written in F# – a functional programming language for the .NET platform with roots in ML and OCaml. I will demonstrate the principles with a simple data type (PList) that can be used in a wide variety of ways for processing data, and which utilizes the number of cores in your computer without you having to worry about it.
Finally I will endulge in a bit of theory for extending this data structure to span multiple machines connected in a computing cluster.
So what is all this talking about “automatic testing”? I know my code work so I don’t have to write some “test case” just to verify that; A complete waste of time!
Just kidding. No one in their right mind would say that they write bugfree code. One of the tools to help weed out the bugs before the code hits production is automatic testing, more specifically unit testing. This helps fix some problems but it also presents some of its own.
The Dilemma
The dilemma I am constantly finding myself in is this: I want to make beautiful code and design, but I also want to make sure it is functioning as it should. Now, there are a number of more or less subtle ways to (more…)