Re: [Caml-list] STM support in OCaml

[skaller <skaller@users.sourceforge.net>]

On Tue, 2006-03-07 at 16:18 +0000, Asfand Yar Qazi wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I've temporarily decided to leave off learning OCaml (although I still intend 
> to learn it at some point) and start learning Haskell due to its support for 
> Software Transactional Memory and lock-free concurrent programming.

AFAIK STM is not lock free. It simply limits the locking period
to a bounded time, at the expense of the whole transaction
taking unbounded time. The final compare/write/retry must
be atomic and is therefore protected by a mutex under the hood.

Sebastian Egner said in another post the main advantage
of STMs: they have a combinator form, that is, they
can be composed.

However, despite the lack of safety in a bolt on 
addition for Ocaml .. the real problem is that STM
isn't that useful unless you have 

(a) a lot of processors
(b) a lot of variables

so that the risk of contention is low and the cost
of long exclusions is high. Ocaml fails to satisfy
property (a) since it doesn't support multi-processing.

-- 
John Skaller <skaller at users dot sourceforge dot net>
Async PL, Realtime software consultants
Checkout Felix: http://felix.sourceforge.net