Getting locks and sharing: was RE: Getting concurrency

Michael Williams mike@REDACTED
Tue Jun 14 19:02:36 CEST 2005


In article <EF4121B4EBC4E045BDE1273F9D0A87FF0ED241@REDACTED>,
 joe.armstrong@REDACTED (Joe Armstrong AL/EAB) writes:

|> The title should be "Getting locks and sharing" - now that's the stuff I just don't get
|> try and make locks and shared data work in the presence of failure - now that *is*
|> a nightmare.


Erlang programmers use concurrency (processes) to program things which happen
independently at the same time. 

Other people use concurrency to let several CPU to process a chunk of data ("a
bunch of threads running arround a big shared data structure").

These two ways to "use" concurrency are fundamentally different.  Bray is writing
about the second way to "use" concurrency" and possibly has never done any
programming which requires the "Erlang" way. My guess is that the multi-core
multi-threaded chip manuafacturers  have probably yet to realise that there is a
market in Erlang type applications. SUN will shut up about this until they have
found some way to squeeze Java into Erlang type applications. 

/mike



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