Glasgow Distributed Haskell

GdH supports distributed stateful interactions on multiple locations. It is a conservative extension of both Concurrent Haskell and GpH, enabling the distribution of the stateful IO threads of the former on the multiple locations of the latter. The programming model includes forking stateful threads on remote locations, explicit communication over channels, and distributed exception handling.

Team

Status

Applications and Evaluation

• EPSRC project High Level Techniques for Distributed Telecommunications Software (GR/R88137) has recently been completed (February 2006). The project was collaboration between Heriot-Watt University and Motorola UK Research Labs, and amongst other activities evaluated GdH and Erlang as technologies for distributed telecoms software in comparison to C++/CORBA.

  Previous publications appear on the project page, and some recent results are given in the papers below. The latter paper compares Erlang, GdH and C++ for engineering a medium-scale (14K lines of C++, 4K lines of Erlang, and 0.5K lines of GdH) telecoms component.

  Nystrom J.H. Trinder P.W. King D.J.
  Are High-level Languages suitable for Robust Telecoms Software?
  Proc. 24th Int. Conference on Computer Safety, Reliability and Security (SAFECOMP'05), Fredrikstad, Norway (September 2005).

  Nystrom, J.H., Trinder, P.W., King,D.J.
  A Comparative Evaluation of Three High-level Distributed Languages for Telecoms Software
  In preparation

• There is a forthcoming Ph.D. thesis on the design, implementation and use of GdH by Robert Pointon.

Further reading: