Name: Concurrent Programming in ML
ISBN: 9780521480895

Concurrent Programming in ML

"Concurrent Programming in ML presents the language Concurrent ML (CML), which supports the union of two important programming models: concurrent programming and functional programming. CML is an extension of the functional language Standard ML (SML) and is included as part of the Standard ML of New Jersey (SML/NJ) distribution. CML supports the programming of process communication and synchronization using a unique higher-order concurrent programming mechanism which allows programmers to define their own communication and synchronization abstractions."--Jacket. "The main focus of the book is on the practical use of concurrency to implement naturally concurrent applications. In addition to a tutorial introduction to programming in CML, this book presents three extended examples of using CML for systems programming: a parallel software build system, a simple concurrent window manager, and an implementation of distributed tuple spaces."--BOOK JACKET. "This book is aimed at programmers and professional developers who want to use CML, as well as students, faculty, and other researchers."--Jacket.

What Hacker News says

davidgrenierJun 2023

This looks brutal, for a lot of people John Reppy's book Concurrent Programming in ML (as in SML not Machine Learning) is going to be much more accessible. Pick the CSP-style library in the programming language of your choice.

Go with goroutines and channels

Clojure with core.async

F# with Hopac

It would be a very interesting project to roll your own in C# using Microsoft Robotics Studio's CCR (Coordination and Concurrency Runtime) (though I speculate those are buffered channels by default).

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davidgrenierNov 2020

If I may recommend, try to find and read a copy of John Reppy's Concurrent Programming in ML. The book is a little bit of an eye opener if only for that.

Hopac is a library that offers an excellent delivery of this model of concurrent programming on .NET and has top notch F# primitives.

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davidgrenierJan 2019

If I may, I'd like to invite you or someone on your team to read a couple of chapters of John Reppy's Concurrent Programming in ML and try Vesa's excellent delivery in https://github.com/Hopac/Hopac.

I'm not clear if you absolutely have to use TPL but CML is likely just a better model for tackling concurrency and Hopac is orders of magnitude more efficient than F#'s async.

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niccaluimAug 2015

Agreed, I found this page hopelessly meandering and confused. The way continuations were explained to me is that they are "the rest of the program," which isn't much better, and it took me a while to wrap my head around them. But in the end they really are simple. As you said it's just the stack and the PC register. Calling a continuation jumps back to where the continuation was created, and execution resumes as though the program had been running there all along.

One neat thing you can do with continuations is use them to implement multitasking—see "Concurrent Programming in ML."

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davidgrenierMay 2023

Oh another thing, I'm not a fan of the premise:

"As a general-purpose memory allocator, though, we can't get away with having no free implementation."

I have a belief that the future of software are short-lived programs that never free memory. Programs allocate and terminate. Short-lived program communicate with each other via blocking CSP-style channels (see Reppy's Concurrent Programming in ML).

If you could also educate me on why this is a bad idea I would appreciate.

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