Re: [Caml-list] Re: Ant: Efficiency of let/and

[Alan Falloon <Al.Falloon@synopsys.com>]

Brian Hurt wrote:

> On Tue, 27 Sep 2005, skaller wrote:
>
>> I personally don't think of this as real parallelism,
>> that's something you get on a machine with K's or M's
>> of processing units .. eg the human eye.
>
>
> Heh.  We've hit the point where we have so many transistors on a chip 
> we literally don't know what to do with them all- we have no idea how 
> to spend the transistors to provide more than very small incremental 
> performance improvements to single-threaded execution.  Which is why 
> the sudden interest in parallelism (Symmetric Mult-Threading aka 
> Hyperthreading, multi-core chips, etc.).  The problem is that the 
> theory on how to write race condition/deadlock/livelock -free code 
> isn't there, to my knowledge (someone please prove me wrong).

I did see a paper called "Composable Memory Transactions" by some of the 
more well know Haskell researchers  its avaliable at  
http://got.net/~landauer/cs/fp/ea8-composablememory_stm.pdf

The idea is to introduce new concurrency abstractions (a replacement for 
mutex and friends) that are composable to make it easy to reason about 
thread-safe sections in isolation.