Workshop on the Theory of Transactional Memory

I'm just back from the WTTM in Rome. It was good to go to the workshop and listen to presentations from the likes of Maurice Herlihy on advances in both hardware and software transactional memory. I was there representing the Cloud-TM work that we're doing in collaboration with others and specifically around Infinispan and JBossTS.

One of my favourite presentations of the event was on the use of pessimistic concurrency control in STM. Most STM approaches use an optimistic approach, which obviously works well in cases where contention is limited. The problem with pessimistic is retaining locks for the duration even when updates are infrequent. However, as the presenter showed, with suitable a priori ordering, pessimistic can be more efficient even in low contention environments. This was good because we tend to use pessimistic concurrency control in JBossTS a lot, and as was shown in the presentation, it's also a lot easier for developers to understand and reason about.

Unfortunately I had to leave the workshop before the last session, so I didn't get to listen to Torvald who represents Red Hat on the transactional C++ working group. That's a shame, because I've been following this effort for several years and know that we may be seeing this in gcc sometime soon. And who knows, maybe EE8 will see some STM eventually.