GC, the simple solution

[Sean Kelly]

Bruno Medeiros wrote:
> Sean Kelly wrote:
>> Bruno Medeiros wrote:
>>>
>>> Makes me think, how does one keep up with this? I mean, one who isn't 
>>> (nor wishes to be) a hardware expert, but wants to keep up with the 
>>> general developments in this area, thus maintaining an overview of it.
>>
>> comp.programming.threads is worth keeping an eye on, though the jargon 
>> can get a bit thick there at times.  The C++ committee is also working 
>> on a new memory model for C++, so any discussion there may be useful. 
>> The easiest way to keep an eye on this is follow the links from Hans 
>> Boehm's website  (http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Hans_Boehm/) though 
>> you could keep an eye on comp.std.c++ as well if you're having trouble 
>> staying awake at night.  Finally, any paper with Maurice Herlihy's 
>> name on it is a useful resource if you want a deeper understanding of 
>> some of these ideas and don't mind some research.  He's got a website 
>> with links to many of his papers, though IIRC some of them are hard to 
>> track down without an ACM membership.
> 
> Well, that's the thing, I just want to have some general knowledge about 
> this area of hardware and concurrency/distributed-systems, not become an 
> expert on it. My time to learn new things is limited (and I definitely 
> have no trouble going to sleep :( ), so my priority goes for learning 
> things that I have immediate need to use/become-involved. If I ever have 
> the need to learn more in-depth I will.
> You see, concurrency is very important for people interested in 
> server-side programming. But for multimedia programming, it's not that 
> important. For now that is, as it seems that with the coming of 
> multicore CPUs, concurrency is becoming more and more of a general 
> software development topic, relevant even for non-intrinsically 
> concurrent apps.

Sadly, I don't know of any more basic sources of information on this 
stuff.  David Butenhof's "Programming with POSIX Threads" is quite good 
for the basic concepts, but beyond that it's mostly research papers, 
wiki topics, etc.  But don't hesitate to ask on comp.programming.threads 
or here if you have a question.

Sean