[Python-Dev] STM and python

[Antoine Pitrou]

On Thu, 1 Dec 2011 01:31:14 +1100
Matt Joiner <anacrolix at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> However given advances in locking and garbage collection in the last
> decade, what attempts have been made recently to try these new ideas
> out? In particular, how unlikely is it that all the thread safe
> primitives, global contexts, and reference counting functions be made
> __transaction_atomic, and magical parallelism performance boosts
> ensue?

IMHO, it sounds a bit too magical to be true.

> I'm aware that C89, platforms without STM/GCC, and single threaded
> performance are concerns. Please ignore these for the sake of
> discussion about possibilities.
> 
> http://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/TransactionalMemory

I find it interesting that the only example of hardware transactional
memory mentioned in this page is a Sun CPU project which has been
cancelled. Does Intel have anything similar in the works?

Regards

Antoine.