Rewriting Concurrent Haskell programs to STM

• Ano de defesa: 2014
• Autor(a) principal: Silva Neto, Francisco Miranda Soares da
• Orientador(a): Lima Filho, Fernando José Castor de
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Tipo de acesso: Acesso aberto
• Idioma: eng
• Instituição de defesa: Universidade Federal de Pernambuco
• Palavras-chave em Português: Refatoração; Haskell; Travas; Memória Transacional em Software; Concorrência; Programação Funcional; Refactoring; Locks; STM; MVar; TVar; TMVar; Concurrency; Functional Programming
• Link de acesso: https://repositorio.ufpe.br/handle/123456789/11435

In recent years, the diminishing rate with which we can increase the amount of transistors in a processor core has slowed down the increase of computers’ power. Moore’s Law appears to be drawing to an end. With it, the assumption that software written today will be more efficiently executed in the future simply due to processors’ evolution is being challenged. On the other hand, parallel applications can still be made more efficient by distributing work among different processors to be executed at the same time, thus reducing overall execution time. To enable parallelization, we must have multiple processor cores. This has led to the popularization of multicore architectures. However, writing parallel applications is not trivial. A program must be either written from the start to be executed in parallel, or later adapted for parallel execution. The programmer has the error-prone task of parallelizing the application through use of concurrency and parallelism constructs. Locking, the most common concurrency option, presents risks for inexperienced programmers, such as the famous Deadlock and Livelock problems. As we move from single core architectures to multicore, our programming languages need to make it easier for the programmers to use concurrency. Many researchers have pointed at Software Transactional Memory (STM) as an answer to that issue, as it is a lock-free, abstract way to guarantee isolated access to shared resources. But adapting for STM a program that uses lock is not simple. Besides being an error-prone task, technical details of the language might require special attention to preserve the program’s behavior. In this dissertation, we propose a set of program transformations for concurrency constructs in Haskell, a purely functional programming language. They may be used to refactor a program’s existing locks into transactional constructs from Haskell’s STM implementation. This allows a programmer to gain the benefits of working on STM even for programs which were already developed using locks. Each transformation is accompanied by execution examples and a discussion on its ability to preserve program behavior. We also present a supporting study, in which a controlled experiment was used to evaluate the benefits of locks or STM for the development of Haskell programs. Although subjects’ opinions tended to favor lock-based concurrency, those which used STM overall committed significantly fewer mistakes and required on average 12% less time to finish their assignments.