[pro] A little success story...

Juan Jose Garcia-Ripoll juanjose.garciaripoll at googlemail.com
Mon Jan 24 09:50:04 UTC 2011


On Mon, Jan 24, 2011 at 10:04 AM, Pascal Costanza <pc at p-cos.net> wrote:

> What is important in an SMP library is the kinds of synchronization
> primitives you get. LispWorks provides both very high-level synchronization
> via mailboxes, which are extremely convenient to use and cover 80-90% of all
> cases, in my experience. On top of that, LispWorks provides the usual mutual
> exclusion via locks, but also more fine-grained synchronization primitives,
> like read/write (shared) locks, compare-and-swap / atomic operations,
> barriers, and ordering of memory accesses. The API is very well designed and
> covers a lot of practically occurring cases.
>

What you say sounds reasonable and also feasible for any implementation out
there. In particular ECL already provides read/write locks, the usual locks
and will soon export compare-and-swap and atomic operations using
libatomic-ops (which is part of ECL already, as it is used by the garbage
collector).


> If you are looking for inspiration, I think the LispWorks documentation is
> available for free on their website. There is also a personal edition of
> LispWorks 6.0 that you can play with.
>

Thanks for the pointer. Obviously, I would rather refrain from using the
personal edition, as there might be some conflicts :-) but the documentation
seems inspiring and terribly simple.

Juanjo

-- 
Instituto de Física Fundamental, CSIC
c/ Serrano, 113b, Madrid 28006 (Spain)
http://juanjose.garciaripoll.googlepages.com
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