Hello, On 6/11/07, Giovanni Piero Deretta <gpderetta@gmail.com> wrote:
AFAIK, Intel does use lock-free techniques heavily in its thread library to wasting time on concurrency primitives,
You correctly point out that the Join library does not contain or depend on lock-free algorithms. The implementation of Join library follows the design outlined in "Compiling Join-Patterns" paper and further developed in JoCaml, Comega and C#.Joins. It explores using C++ template programming to capture the design idea and optimizations developed thru this lineage of languages and libraries. Indeed specific lock-free algorithms and data structures are not in the design consideration. so I do not think
the current implementation of your library would compare favorably with it. On the other hand, I do not see why the same techniques couldn't be applied equally to your library.
Could you be more specific about the places in code and design of the Join library where i should improve? My number one purpose of proposing this library is to invite experts on this list to review its design and implementation. Please be specific to the point to be helpful. Also i have been talking to Microsoft researchers who developed Cw and C#.Joins library to discuss design and implementation trade-offs and learnt a lot. Hopefully based on all these feedbacks, the Join library can be improved to be a real useful library. You need to be an expert on lock free programming (which I am not) to
take advantage of it, and experts in this area are still uncommon, so you may have an hard time optimizing your library.
Are you considering libraries not based on lock-free algorithms inherently inferior to or unoptimized compared with libraries with lock-free algorithms? Could you expand on this a little more? if you can use Join's implementation as examples, it will be more educational for me. To me, what is best about Join is that its primitives (async/synch methods and chords) supports a high level asynchronous concurrency programming model: orchestration of asynchronous events/messages/data_flows, which is well suited to developing today's asynchronous, distributed applications. And these primitives happen to be fundamental enough so that you can use them to encode various concurrency designs as demonstrated in over a dozen tutorials. There are many concurrency models, such as STM, futures and deferred methods, and of course lock-free algorithms. Join is just one of them, and it is not silver bullet. You may want check out other boost concurrency libraries such as the futures and defer library by Braddock Gaskill. Thanks for looking into Join. Yigong http://channel.sourceforge.net