[tlug] STM (was: Re: work times & accommodation @tokyo)

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

Attila Kinali writes:
 > On Fri, 25 Jul 2008 06:19:54 +0900
 > "Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com> wrote:
 > 
 > > And what problem does use of Haskell solve for Google?  Google's big
 > > problem is concurrency.  So is STM a standard part of GHC 6.8?  How
 > > well-debugged is it?  Can you refer me to the HOWTOs on using it to
 > > solve google-sized problems?  How does this interface with modules
 > > written in other languages that don't have STM?  Is it as efficient as
 > > SP-J's chapter in "Beautiful Code" would suggest, or does it require
 > > problems that are as easy to factor in your head as the toy problem he
 > > presents there?
 > 
 > Does STM work in real world applications?

Of course it does, if you pick the right applications.  That's my
point, though, knowing which applications and how to factor them to use
STM effectively is probably equivalent to the general concurrency
problem at the present time.

 > What i think the problem is, that our programming languages
 > today have a very bad abstraction of concurency and that
 > the solution lies in the programming language rather then
 > in a new way of locking.

But that's exactly the way SP-J sells STM in his chapter in /Beautiful
Code/, as a better abstraction of concurrency.