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Thank you, I feel like Skip is very close to the language I've always wanted. Its MVCC looks very similar to Clojure's, I'm having trouble finding a good link

Thank you, I feel like Skip is very close to the language I've always wanted. Its MVCC looks very similar to Clojure's, I'm having trouble finding a good link about it: https://sw1nn.com/blog/2012/04/11/clojure-stm-what-why-how/ https://sw1nn.com/blog/2012/04/11/clojure-stm-what-why-how/ The gist of it is that instead of tracking multiple separate locations in memory for values, the software transactional memory (STM) references data by value. So if you assign the value {a: 42, b: 24} to two variables x and y, that value is only stored in memory in one place that the variables both point to. Then if one of the variables changes something, for example y.b = 25, this big tree structure works like copy-on-write and makes copies of branches when mutations occur. So internally, a: 42 is one reference and b: (24 or 25) is another reference. So rather than using 4 cells of memory, we've only used 3. This frees the developer from having to micromanage memory resources and makes a lot of other things like concurrency "just work" without locks. Do I have this correct?

vjeux 8y ago
Your explanation looks correct! The practical application is having a webserver that runs a bunch of requests in parallel but that can all share the same memoization cache. We don't want to lock the full memoization cache and therefore block all the other requests when one thread writes a new value.
Serow225 8y ago
FWIW, MATLAB does a lot of this kind of optimization in its internal implementation of the core datatypes. There are a lot of smart compiler/JIT people that have worked hard on it over the years to optimize the internal guts despite the naive design of the language due to its age and some poor design decisions made ages ago that cannot be changed due to extreme backwards compatibility requirements. Kind of like javascript and V8/SpiderMonkey :)
- zackmorris 8y ago
  Thank you, I didn't know that MATLAB did that. I'm a huge fan of it and hope that someday other matrix programming frameworks like TensorFlow, OpenCL and CUDA move to a similar general-purpose syntax that frees the developer from having to deal with the boilerplate associated with old OpenGL-style buffer representations.

vjeux 8y ago

Your explanation looks correct! The practical application is having a webserver that runs a bunch of requests in parallel but that can all share the same memoization cache. We don't want to lock the full memoization cache and therefore block all the other requests when one thread writes a new value.

Serow225 8y ago

FWIW, MATLAB does a lot of this kind of optimization in its internal implementation of the core datatypes. There are a lot of smart compiler/JIT people that have worked hard on it over the years to optimize the internal guts despite the naive design of the language due to its age and some poor design decisions made ages ago that cannot be changed due to extreme backwards compatibility requirements. Kind of like javascript and V8/SpiderMonkey :)

zackmorris 8y ago
Thank you, I didn't know that MATLAB did that. I'm a huge fan of it and hope that someday other matrix programming frameworks like TensorFlow, OpenCL and CUDA move to a similar general-purpose syntax that frees the developer from having to deal with the boilerplate associated with old OpenGL-style buffer representations.