STM [ was Java > Scala ]

[Russel Winder]

On Sun, 2011-12-04 at 23:08 -0600, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
[...]
> Anyway, my comment is strictly on that discussion, not on the entire 
> effort within the Python community. When we were working on D's 
> concurrency model Bartosz pushed for a while quite strongly in favor of 
> STM, but I predicted it won't pan out, at least not in time for us to 
> rely on it. It was 2008 and the issues with STM were by then understood 
> but not resolved properly. It's still too early to make a verdict one 
> way or another. There's a steady stream of related publications coming. 
> It will be interesting to see what happens.

The current hints appear to be that STM does not scale well.  I haven't
done any experiments myself, and I haven't seen real data from people
who do claim to have.  The languages with STM that I know are Haskell
and Clojure.  Haskell has fundamental problems with parallelism because
it is a lazy language -- though there is a lot of work trying to deal
with this generally, and Simon Peyton-Jones and Simon Marlowe have their
data parallel stuff which works well from what I can see.  Clojure will
have to be investigated further... 

-- 
Russel.
=============================================================================
Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200   voip: sip:russel.winder at ekiga.net
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