manticore is a programming language created in 2009.
| #3490on PLDB | 15Years Old |
The Manticore project is an effort to design and implement a new functional language for parallel programming. Unlike many earlier parallel languages, Manticore is a heterogeneous language that supports parallelism at multiple levels. Specifically, the Manticore language combines Concurrent ML-style explicit concurrency with fine-grain, implicitly threaded, parallel constructs. These lectures will introduce the Manticore language and explore a variety of programs written to take advantage of heterogeneous parallelism. At the explicit-concurrency level, Manticore supports the creation distinct threads of control and the coordination of threads through first-class synchronous-message passing. Message-passing synchronization, in contrast to shared-memory synchronization, fits naturally with the functional-programming paradigm. At the implicit-parallelism level, Manticore supports a diverse collection of parallel constructs for different granularities of work. Many of these constructs are inspired by common functional-programming idioms. In addition to describing the basic mechanisms, we will present a number of useful programming techniques that are enabled by these mechanisms. Finally, we will briefly discuss some of the implementation techniques used to execute Manticore programs on commodity multicore computers.
fun forever (init : ’a) (f: ’a -> ’a) : unit =
let
fun loop s = loop (f s)
val _ = spawn (loop init)
in
()
end