I'm not sure I understand all of your points. Anyway I believe that purely functional programming is generally beneficial to massively parallel processing because "pure" functions do not alter state outside the function until the computation has ended. Purely functional programs require less synchronization. I/O is a problem for everyone writing parallel programs, be they purely functional or not. Exception handling is another huge issue. (The author of ParaSail tries to deal with it by basically eliminating the need for exceptions - not easy if you can divide by zero...)
You can also write massively parallel programs very easily in traditional imperative languages like Fortran if the problem lends to straightforward parallelization like parallel matrix or array processing, parallel data flow. The real problem is how to automatically transfer programs that are not devised for parallel processing and perhaps not even purely functional into massively parallelized programs by analyzing and optimizing the control and data flow as a whole. Of course, functional programs without mutation make that easier. On Wed, 5 Feb 2014 10:48:50 -0600 Lawrence Bottorff <borg...@gmail.com> wrote: Isn't purely functional really just waiting for > One Memory/Massive Parallel wherein all its supposed foibles are > moot? The whole "sort-of" functional world simply takes all the > discretism for granted. But Isn't the purely functional paradigm > driving us toward a day when some sort of OM/MP (virtual or real) is > the rule? > ____________________ Racket Users list: http://lists.racket-lang.org/users
