[toronto-lisp] April meeting minutes available on the website

[Michael DiBernardo]

Papers #4 and #6 on this page:
http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~norm/508/2007W1/readinglist.html

might help out those of us who aren't well-versed in the debate
between event-based and thread-based concurrency. A lot of the topics
that are coming up in this thread have been discussed (and discussed
and discussed and...) in O/S-related literature for a looong time :)

-Debo

On Mon, Apr 13, 2009 at 10:57 PM, Vishvajit Singh
<vishvajitsingh at gmail.com> wrote:
> Thanks for the clarification, Doug. I see that your opinion is more
> nuanced than the version I put up. I'll update it soon and put up a
> more accurate version of your opinion.
>
> Rich Hickey's ant simulation is a good case study for Clojure
> concurrency in action. You may find it interesting to read through:
>
> http://clojure.googlegroups.com/web/ants.clj
>
> It will take me some time to fully work through your arguments, as I
> haven't worked very much with concurrency myself. How do you feel your
> opinions hold up on the issue of simple convenience for the
> programmer? I mean, using select() for IO, fork() for concurrency, and
> Berkeley DB for transactions throughout your programs takes extra
> effort as compared to using the built-in language mechanisms. In the
> case of the ant colony simulation, you'd have to worry about the
> problem of distributing the ants among N forked processes, where N is
> the number of processors, whereas if you use shared-memory threads,
> you let the OS handle that.
>
> Regards,
> Vish Singh
>
> On Mon, Apr 13, 2009 at 7:20 PM,  <doug at hcsw.org> wrote:
>>> We discussed Clojure's concurrency mechanism (Software Transactional Memory).. Doug wonders whether it is overkill to include such a complex mechanism built-in to the language. Much disagreement here among the members.
>>
>> I have never used Clojure so I can't comment much about it
>> specifically, but that is not what I said about concurrency.
>> Let me elaborate again:
>>
>> Before you use threads (by which I mean pre-emptively scheduled,
>> shared memory processes) ask yourself why:
>>
>> * To handle multiple streams of IO? Solution: Schedule one
>>  process to handle all the IO by using an event API like select(),
>>  non-pre-emptively scheduled threads like GNU pth
>>  (http://www.gnu.org/software/pth/), or "coroutines", "green threads",
>>  whatever you wanna call em.
>>
>> * To take advantage of multiple CPUs or multiple disks?
>>  Solution: Learn how the fork() system call works and use
>>  sockets or pipes for message passing.
>>
>> To me there is no reason to ruin a great language like Common Lisp
>> with thread-related non-determinism. I think having to ban mutable
>> data structures from your language as in Clojure is a symptom of
>> a poor concurrency strategy. As I said at the meeting, in my opinion
>> the best implementation of transactional memory is Berkeley DB:
>>
>> * Clojure's memory isn't persistent so if your application
>>  crashes or the power goes out you will lose all your memory.
>>  BDB can persist the memory to disk guaranteeing transactional
>>  consistency (although this is optional).
>>
>> * As far as I know, Clojure transactional memory can only be
>>  accessed by threads running in the same process. BDB DBs are
>>  multi-process AND multi-thread.
>>
>> * BDB allows replication so that the memory is distributed to
>>  physically separate machines. Each will have a transactionally
>>  consistent view of the data.
>>
>> * BDB DBs can be larger than your address space on 32 bit systems.
>>  I'd guess that Clojure's transactional storage is limited on such
>>  systems.
>>
>> * BDB hotbackups let you snapshot a DB without interrupting
>>  anything. I use the included db_hotbackup utility.
>>
>> * BDB DBs can be accessed by programs in any language: Perl,
>>  Common Lisp, C, etc. Probably from Clojure too.
>>
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>>
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