Atomic ets

[Dave Smith]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1


On Dec 14, 2005, at 12:29 PM, Thomas Lindgren wrote:

> Note that transactions provide another conceptually
> simple approach. My prediction is that fine-grain,
> hardware-assisted transactions will largely replace
> locking in conventional systems. But not for a while;
> the comp.arch. researchers have just gotten their
> teeth into it.

If you will humor a Erlang newbie, what exactly is the difference  
between a "transaction" and a mutex/critical section? And, if the  
difference is negligible, wouldn't introducing a transaction  
construct or the other "atomic" ideas mentioned furthered down the  
thread, just (re-)introduce the complexity of all the locking madness  
Erlang currently shields us from?

The complaints about having to serialize to a gen_server seem odd to  
me (again, a newbie :)). Mutexes introduce a similar sort of  
serialization (i.e. you have to design carefully for speed/ 
contention), yet have much more difficult semantics.

Just my $0.02...

D.
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.1 (Darwin)

iD8DBQFDoXq3s6zMNAt8YgcRAhWyAJ4j41r40XghRrazs3xA9rkB12+eHQCfcv6F
05StLget1N0oDIfy9dtBoyk=
=qGX9
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----