Along with a Nexus 7, I also acquired a Kindle Paperwhite over winter break. (Wi-Fi only) I have been quite pleased by this purchase, though in an unexpected way: while I have not increased the number of books I read, the Kindle has materially changed how I read articles on the Internet. Not via their web browser, which is essentially unusable except for the simplest tasks, but via tools which take articles on the Internet and convert them into ebook form.
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I’d like to talk about some nitty-gritty details of GHC’s thread scheduling, discovered over the course of working on stride scheduling for GHC. Most of these choices are merely implementation details and are not part of any specification. While these choices shouldn’t be relied upon, they are worth knowing, since many of these details were accreted over the course of many performance bugs, benchmark tests and other battles. In this post, I’ll attempt to give some historical insight into why many choices were made. These insights should generalize to any system that would like to implement green threads, lightweight threads that use less memory than traditional operating system threads. For space reasons, I’m not going to talk about STM or sparks (though they are also quite interesting).
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So you want to make a web app. In today’s world, there is a panoply of software to assist you: you can use an all-in-one framework, or you can grab libraries to deal with the common needs of templating, database access, interactivity, etc. These libraries unify common functionality and take care of edge-cases you might otherwise not have the resources to deal with.
But there is one tool which is conspicuously absent: the natural language processing library.
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