All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

Concurrency and assumptions

DAxelrod on 2007-02-20T02:59:17

I'm convinced that some problems are considered hard mainly because they're really good at exposing unquestioned assumptions at different levels of a system.

Barrier → Please Don’t Rely on Memory Barriers for Synchronization! → C++ and the Perils of Double-Checked Locking
Barrier → The Problem with Threads → The Problem with Threads

In concurrency, one of those levels having its assumptions challenged is the programmer, but that's not the only reason it's hard.

Thanks for the links...

renodino on 2007-02-20T17:22:19

A nice collection to add to my bookmarks, and serious food for thought. My only nit is the title of the last article: "threads" has come to mean many things, I think a better title might be "The Problem With Threads As Fibers", not the possibly implied "The Problem With Threaded Concurrency".

I hope people take time to read the articles before just assuming they're another reason to dismiss/avoid Perl's threads. ithreads has its issues, but applying some of the techniques in Lee's article may mitigate the nondeterminism issues somewhat (as I've attempted w/ Thread::Apartment).

Re:Thanks for the links...

Alias on 2007-07-25T05:23:20

This issue with assumptions if why I removed as many as I could and came up with Process.pm :)

I'm having fairly good success with it for things other than actual parallel processing (running different parts of a program across two different versions of Perl).

I'm hoping it's going to be a slam dunk when the time comes to do some serious work with it.