DMD 1.029 and 2.013 releases

[Sean Chittenden]

> The problem with locks are:
>
> 1) they are expensive, so people try to optimize them away (grep for  
> "double checked locking")
> 2) people forget to use the locks
> 3) deadlocks

Having had several run ins with pthreads_*(3) implementations earlier  
this year, I started digging around for alternatives and stashed two  
such nuggets away.  Both papers struck me as "not stupid" and rang  
high on my "I wish this would make its way into D" scale.

"Transactional Locking II"
http://research.sun.com/scalable/pubs/DISC2006.pdf

"Software Transactional Memory Should Not Be Obstruction-Free"
http://berkeley.intel-research.net/rennals/pubs/052RobEnnals.pdf

How you'd wrap these primitives into the low level language, is left  
up to an exercise for the implementor and language designer, but,  
getting low-level primitives in place that allow for efficient locks  
strikes me as highly keen.

-sc

--
Sean Chittenden
sean at chittenden.org
http://sean.chittenden.org/