Parallel Lisp: Languages and Systems

Abstract

A Lisp-based approach is attractive for parallel computing since Lisp languages and systems assume significant clerical burdens, such as storage management. Parallel Lisps thus enable programmers to focus on the new problems introduced by using concurrency. Parallel Lisps now exist that can execute realistic applications with “industrial-strength” performance, but there are applications whose requirements they do not handle elegantly. Recent work has contributed new, elegant ideas in the areas of speculative computation, continuations, exception handling, aggregate data structures, and scheduling. Using these ideas, it should be possible to build “second generation” parallel Lisp systems that are as powerful and elegantly structured as sequential Lisp systems.