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226 :: tinySTM

• MFlamer (orginal) [2013-09-05T02:33:34+02:00] view original

  Araq, I read a short forum post from awhile back where you mention utilizing tinySTM in nimrod. I'm curious if you still think this would be a good idea. If so I might do a little research...

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• Araq (orginal) [2013-09-05T13:05:41+02:00] view original

  Wrapping tinySTM and giving it a nimrodic interface would be an awesome research project. I'm now much more skeptical about STM, but that doesn't mean much since I never used it in practice. ;-)

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• MFlamer (orginal) [2013-09-05T17:43:41+02:00] view original

  I don't have much of a practical opinion regarding STM either, other than it being a cool feature that people brag about being tightly integrated with Clojure and Haskell. And these are the types of things we want people bragging about Nimrod for:-). I'm trying to think of things we need to get more wide spread adoption. Nimrod is a very nice language, I want it to have a vibrant community.

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• MFlamer (orginal) [2013-09-06T05:38:29+02:00] view original

  After reading this article, I wonder if STM is more appropriate for pure data structures, hence its success in Haskell and Clojure. http://joeduffyblog.com/2010/01/03/a-brief-retrospective-on-transactional-memory/

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• MFlamer (orginal) [2013-09-06T16:13:27+02:00] view original

  I successfully built tinySTM using minGW on Windows. I have a .a lib and the headers. There are 8 header files, 7 of which look short and should be easy for c2nim to translate. The other is a little longer and is giving c2nim some trouble, I might need a little help with it. So, my initial opinion is that the bindings to Nimrod should be reasonable to get setup. tinySTM documentation is tough to come by, so far I have found a mailing list and this http://kris.kalish.net/2009/09/getting-started-with-tinystm-ubuntu-9-04/ tutorial. I'm not clear yet on how Nimrod threads compare to pthreads or the boost threading library mentioned in the tutorial or how stm will interact with the local GC on our threads, these are some of the things I need to look into. I'm also wondering if stm can be implemented as a standalone nimrod library or if it needs to be integrated with the compiler. I'll keep you posted and am open to opinions obviously.

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