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Programmable Concurrency in a Pure and Lazy Language

Programmable Concurrency in a Pure and Lazy Language, Peng Li's 2008 PhD dissertation, is a bit more implementation focused than is common on LtU. The paper does touch on a wide range of concurrency mechanisms so it might have value to any language designer considering ways to tackle the concurrency beast.

First, this dissertation presents a Haskell solution based on concurrency monads. Unlike most previous work in the field, this approach provides clean interfaces to both multithreaded programming and event-driven programming in the same application, but it also does not require native support of continuations from compilers or runtime systems. Then, this dissertation investigates for a generic solution to support lightweight concurrency in Haskell, compares several possible concurrency configurations and summarizes the lessons learned.

The paper's summary explains what I like most about it:

the project ... solves a systems problem using a language-based approach. Systems programmers, Haskell implementors and programming language designers may each find their own interests in this dissertation.

Even if concurrency isn't your thing, section 6.3 describes the author's findings on the pros and cons of both purity and laziness in a systems programming context.