I was checking out Intel's "whatif" site and their Transactional Memory compiler (each thread has to make atomic commits or rollback the system's memory, like a Database would). It seems like a promising way to replace locks and mutexes but I can't find many testimonials. Does anyone here have any input? ...
It seems that there has been a recent rising interest in STM (software transactional memory) frameworks and language extensions. Clojure in particular has an excellent implementation which uses MVCC (multi-version concurrency control) rather than a rolling commit log. GHC Haskell also has an extremely elegant STM monad which also allow...
I am in the design phase of a programming language, currently thinking about the concurrency aspects. I need to figure out a consistency model, i.e. how data is handled by concurrent processes programmed in this language. There are two important criteria: I prefer ease-of-use over performance, as long as the consistency model allows g...
I've been reading up a lot about transactional memory lately. There is a bit of hype around TM, so a lot of people are enthusiastic about it, and it does provide solutions for painful problems with locking, but you regularly also see complaints: You can't do I/O You have to write your atomic sections so they can run several times (be c...
In terms of actual low level atomic instructions and memory fences (I assume they're used), how do you implement STM? The part that's mysterious to me is that given some arbitrary chunk of code, you need a way to go back afterward and determine if the values used in each step were valid. How do you do that, and how do you do it efficient...
I've been doing some work on transactional memory and its viability for systems programming (databases, operating systems, servers, etc.). My own experience employing transactions, together with having seen how few communities use transactions in real code, has raised a question: What would convince you, a developer writing production co...