June 2007
Intermediate to advanced
618 pages
18h 15m
English
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Chapter 24. Beautiful Concurrency
Simon Peyton Jones
The free lunch is over.[50] We have grown used to the idea that our programs will go faster when we buy a next-generation processor, but that time has passed. While that next-generation chip will have more CPUs, each individual CPU will be no faster than the previous year’s model. If we want our programs to run faster, we must learn to write parallel programs.[51]
Parallel programs execute in a nondeterministic way, so they are hard to test, and bugs can be almost impossible to reproduce. For me, a beautiful program is one that is so simple and elegant that it obviously has no mistakes, rather than merely having no obvious mistakes.[52] If we want to write parallel programs that work reliably, we must pay particular attention to beauty. Sadly, parallel programs are often less beautiful than their sequential cousins; in particular they are, as we shall see, less modular.
In this chapter, I’ll describe Software Transactional Memory (STM), a promising new approach to programming shared-memory parallel processors that seems to support modular programs in a way that current technology does not. By the time we are done, I hope you will be as enthusiastic as I am about STM. It is not a solution to every problem, but it is a beautiful and inspiring attack on the daunting ramparts of concurrency.
A Simple Example: Bank Accounts
Here is a simple programming task.
Write a procedure to transfer money from one bank account to another. To keep ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.