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Thanks a lot for that, very interesting perspective (particularly the challenges with unbounded transactions and nontransactional I/O). It makes me wonder (i) w

Thanks a lot for that, very interesting perspective (particularly the challenges with unbounded transactions and nontransactional I/O). It makes me wonder (i) whether bounded transactions were also found to be too hard to use (given restrictions on transaction sizes) (ii) what has replaced STM in terms of better fine-grained concurrency control abstractions (if anything). Maybe better type system support through new languages (e.g. Rust)?

jdougan 4y ago
I am not familiar with any details, but the haskellians seem to still be working with STM. At least there are a bunch on talks online about it. I had spent most of the 90s working with transactional systems and while they are useful and powerful, they aren't magic and require awareness to keep from making errors. Joe Duffy wasn't wrong when he says those problems are well known. The solutions normally are either Don't Do That Then, or managing the policy details and logic yourself, which wasn't giving them the easy concurrency they were trying for. Edit: He has a followup post at http://joeduffyblog.com/2010/05/16/more-thoughts-on-transactional-memory/ http://joeduffyblog.com/2010/05/16/more-thoughts-on-transact...