Data parallelism

[larsbergstrom]

We have attempted to gain parallelism in Servo, but in all cases where we operate over a shared data structure, this requires a significant amount of unsafe code. We'd like to support:

• Basic data-parallel operations
• More complicated traversals (top-down, bottom-up, weighted-edge priority, topological, etc.) of either DAGs or graphs

Note that the key here is being able to define kernels of computation that work on the elements stored in these structures that ensure at least the illusion of ownership transfer between the shared data structure and kernel function and back is maintained.

CC: @pcwalton @nikomatsakis

[alexcrichton]

cc @aturon

[aturon]

@larsbergstrom I would love to chat with you about this in detail. I've been doing some work building lock-free data structures with an ownership transfer interface, but it's still in the early stages.

[rust-highfive]

This issue has been moved to the RFCs repo: rust-lang/rfcs#315