Parallel block-delayed sequences

Abstract

Programming languages using functions on collections of values, such as map, reduce, scan and filter, have been used for over fifty years. Such collections have proven to be particularly useful in the context of parallelism because such functions are naturally parallel. However, if implemented naively they lead to the generation of temporary intermediate collections that can significantly increase memory usage and runtime. To avoid this pitfall, many approaches use "fusion" to combine operations and avoid temporary results. However, most of these approaches involve significant changes to a compiler and are limited to a small set of functions, such as maps and reduces.