On 6/22/07, apfelmus
I guess you have considered Software Transactional Memory for atomic operations? http://research.microsoft.com/~simonpj/papers/stm/index.htm
Also, write-once-read-many data structures (like lazy evaluation uses them all the time) are probably very easy to get locked correctly.
STM was *the* justification to the mgt for letting me use Haskell rather than C++. :-) However, you do need to take care, because in this context it would be easy to end up creating great big transactions which conflict with one another, which quite aside from wasting CPU on retries, can in extreme cases lead to starvation. A bit like laziness, STM is fantastic for correctness, but can be a bit obtuse for performance. With that proviso, I think STM is better than sliced bread.[*] Incidentally, I read Herlihy's papers on lock free data structures early on in my work on parallelism and concurrency for Mercury in the mid 90's. What a shame I didn't have the wit to understand them properly at the time, or Mercury might have had STM 10 years ago. :-) T. [*] People who know me well, would realize that since I bake my own bread and slice it with a bread-knife myself, comparison to sliced bread may be faint praise. It isn't. -- Dr Thomas Conway drtomc@gmail.com Silence is the perfectest herald of joy: I were but little happy, if I could say how much.