status and roadmap for cloud haskell?

[Ben]

hello --

i'm very interested in the new implementation of cloud haskell that well-typed is working on.

1. what's the current status? it looks like the TCP transport is close to done but that there is only a sketch of the distributed-process API.

2. what's the roadmap? are people working on this actively? any milestones plotted out?

3. how can i help?

best regards, ben

[Clark Gaebel]

Funny you should ask.

SPJ _just_ gave a talk about this at Scala Days 2012. Link below:

http://skillsmatter.com/podcast/home/haskell-cloud/js-4179

Regards,
- Clark

[Ben]

clark --

i haven't watched the video closely, but i was under the impression that the SPJ talk was about the cloud haskell paper and the work jeff epstein did. i was asking about the reimplementation that the well-typed guys are doing.

best, ben

[Clark Gaebel]

The talk was done yesterday, so I hope he covers it. I'm watching it right now.

This looks like the github repo, so you can check it out there:

https://github.com/haskell-distributed/distributed-process

[Andrew Cowie]

On Fri, 2012-05-18 at 19:58 -0400, Clark Gaebel wrote:
> SPJ _just_ gave a talk about this at Scala Days 2012. Link below:
>
> http://skillsmatter.com/podcast/home/haskell-cloud/js-4179

It is exceptionally annoying that that video is marked "private" and
only available if viewed within their browser-based player. The fact
that you can't just download it for later offline viewing is just rude
(non-private vimeo clips can be downloaded no-problem). What about this
necessitated "private"? Or perhaps, given that it's private, why are we
encouraging people to try and watch it?

Their player crashes rather frequently, which is tedious. This keeps up
and I'm going to have to give up on watching the presentation, which
would be a shame.

AfC
Sydney

[Edsko de Vries]

Hi Ben,

Yes, we are actively working on the new implementation of Cloud Haskell. Our focus so far has been on the design of the transport API and a robust TCP implementation. Both of these are nearly done now. The new design can be found at 

https://github.com/haskell-distributed/distributed-process/blob/master/network-transport/src/Network/Transport.hs

We also started writing some documentation:

https://github.com/haskell-distributed/distributed-process/wiki/Network.Transport

  is an overview of the Transport API

https://github.com/haskell-distributed/distributed-process/wiki/Programming-with-Network.Transport

  is a tutorial on using the Transport API from an application developer's perspective

https://github.com/haskell-distributed/distributed-process/wiki/Creating-new-transports

  describes the TCP transport as an example for developers of other transports

We don't have an explicit roadmap at this stage, but we will probably soon move to the next layer (Cloud Haskell proper). 

At this point, there are mainly two ways in which you can help:

1. Play with the TCP transport. Go through the tutorial, write some simple applications, do some benchtests, and let us know if you find any bugs or unexpected slow behaviour. 

2. Implement other transports. We probably won't have time for that. It will be useful to have other transports available, and moreover an implementation of another transport (even if it doesn't get to a usable state) would be a good way to make sure that the abstract Transport API is general enough to cover other transports.

Feel free to post here or contact me personally if you have any questions.

Edsko de Vries

Well-Typed

[Edsko de Vries]

Hi,

I should have said: we discovered a bug in Network.Socket which affects Mac OS X, so 'cabal test' will fail on Mac OS X unless you apply a patch to the 'network' package (https://github.com/haskell/network/commit/4adfdb2c42461fdac7ceb81e1e0a472e3475fdef). 

Edsko

[Ben Ford]

I've started playing with a zeromq transport. ZMQ seems like a perfect fit for the transport layer!

I had a poke about with eclipseFP on windows today - but had problems building zeromq-haskell. I will try and get something running on linux. My github repo is here https://github.com/boothead/distributed-process/tree/zeromq-backend (this is for future reference - there's nothing in it at the moment!)

Cheers,

Ben