On Thu, Dec 1, 2011 at 10:58 AM, Gregory P. Smith <greg@krypto.org> wrote:
Azul has been using hardware transactional memory on their custom CPUs (and likely STM in their current x86 virtual machine based products) to great effect for their massively parallel Java VM (700+ cpu cores and gobs of ram) for over 4 years. I'll leave it to the reader to do the relevant searching to read more on that.
My point is: This is up to any given Python VM implementation to take advantage of or not as it sees fit. Shoe horning it into an existing VM may not make much sense but anyone is welcome to try.
There's a patch somewhere on the tracker to add an "Armin Rigo hook" to the CPython eval loop so he can play with STM in Python as well (at least, I think it was STM he wanted it for - it might have been something else). Cheers, Nick. -- Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan@gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia