Evaluation strategies are a very general concept: the talk outlined how they can be used to model a wide range of commonly used programming paradigms, including divide-and-conquer, pipeline parallelism, producer/consumer parallelism, and data-oriented parallelism. Because they are based on unrestricted higher-order functions, they can also capture irregular parallel structures.
Evaluation strategies are not just of theoretical interest: they have evolved out of our experience in parallelising several large-scale parallel applications, where they have proved invaluable in helping to manage the complexities of parallel behaviour. The largest application we have studied to date, Lolita, is a 60,000 line natural language parser. Initial results show that for these programs we can achieve acceptable parallel performance, while incurring minimal overhead for using evaluation strategies.