A Cross-Platform Scalable I/O Manager for GHC : Improving Haskell Networking on Windows

Abstract: Haskell is a popular functional programming language. GHC is an industrial-strength implementation of Haskell that has a number of features making it a very attractive platformfor writing high-performance network applications. Unfortunately, support for modern scalable network I/O APIs in the GHC runtime system is currently limited to Unix-likeplatforms. Haskell applications targeting Windows therefore cannot attain the same levels of scalability and performance as their Unix counterparts, and also have some correctness problems. A redesign of GHC’s Windows I/O subsystem is proposed, making use of the Windows I/O completion ports API. A proof of concept implementation of the design is evaluated and found to be a strict improvement over the current state of affairs.