From Non-determinism to Goroutines: A Fair Implementation of Curry in Go

Abstract

The declarative programming language Curry amalgamates demand-driven evaluation from functional programming with non-determinism from logic programming. In contrast to Prolog, the search strategy for non-deterministic computations is not fixed so that complete or parallel strategies are reasonable for Curry. In particular, a desirable option is a fair strategy which frees the programmer from considering the influence of the search strategy to the success of a computation. In this paper we describe an implementation with this property. Based on recent developments on operational models for functional logic programming, we present a new implementation which transforms Curry programs in several transformation steps into Go programs. By exploiting lightweight threads in the form of goroutines, we obtain a complete and fair implementation which automatically uses multi-processing to speed up non-deterministic computations. This has the effect that, in some cases, non-deterministic algorithms are more efficiently evaluated than deterministic ones.