Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Functional Compilers
Programming in a functional programming style can often lead to surprisingly elegant solutions to complicated problems. This arises in part from abstracting away from locations and state and thinking instead in terms of values and functions, in a mathematical style. Also, importantly, the lack of side effects means that the components are easily composable. This is particularly important for parallel programs since it means the lack of side effects leads to code that can run in parallel but has a deterministic sequential semantics. Since the functional programming style focuses on values rather than state, it abstracts away from the notion of memory and location. This can be viewed as a failure, or as an opportunity.
On the one side it fails to let the user control how memory is laid out or how operations are ordered during the computation. This disallows many optimizations by the user that are crucial for performance on modern hardware—for example, laying out structures adjacently so they share a cache line, or avoiding levels of indirection, often referred to as boxing.
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