Ouch. These last few days, I’ve been fix­ing a few lin­ger­ing bugs in my STM sys­tem, and last night, I finally nailed them. Specif­i­cally, it is now pos­si­ble to open vari­ables within a trans­ac­tion as read-only. An obvi­ous opti­miza­tion, right? At least that’s the idea. Less work is required by the STM sys­tem if we can trust that the vari­able isn’t mod­i­fied by this trans­ac­tion. (more…)

As promised yes­ter­day, I’d like to show off a few bits of my STM library. Of course it’s far from done, and is still miss­ing sev­eral key fea­tures, but the core library is in pretty good shape. So as they say on the inter­nets, “my STM library, let me show you it” (more…)

We’ve more or less set­tled in our new apart­ment, and we’ve got inter­net… sort of! (more…)

By now, I’ve read an awful lot of papers about STM sys­tems, and cer­tain trends are really start­ing to stand out, not so much in terms of the algo­rithms used or the clever schemes invented to make trans­ac­tions appear atomic, but in how they inter­face with the actual language.

It has really under­lined to me just how deeply entrenched most Java, C and C++ pro­gram­mers are in the imper­a­tive mind­set. (more…)

As I men­tioned a few weeks ago, I’m writ­ing my master’s the­sis on soft­ware trans­ac­tional mem­ory (STM).

Of course it is still early in the process, and while I’ve got some ideas for my imple­men­ta­tion, and have started pro­to­typ­ing parts of it, most of the time has been spent catch­ing up on all the exist­ing work in the field.

Lit­tle did I know when I accepted the sub­ject that there’d been writ­ten that many papers about it over the last decade. Phew… A com­menter asked me for the ref­er­ences I found use­ful, so here’s an incom­plete list: (more…)

Been a bit quiet on the blog front lately. I’ve been busy get­ting my master’s the­sis off the ground.

But now it is offi­cial. (more…)