On 26/09/2018 14:27, Andrew Dinn wrote:
:
I really don't understand how thread safety comes into the argument
here. How is some other mechanism going to avoid the need for client
threads -- or, rather, the applications which create them them -- to
manage concurrent updates of NVM? Are you perhaps thinking of some form
of software transactional memory? I'm really struggling to understand
why you keep raising this point without any further detail to explain
how the lack of exclusion and synchronization primitives constitutes a
problem this API that can be bypassed by rolling some equivalent
alternative into another API.
The reason that we've mentioned it a few times is because it's a
significant issue. If you have a byte buffer then you can't have
different threads accessing different parts of the buffer at the same
time, at least not with any of the relative get/put methods as they
depend on the buffer position. Sure you can globally synchronize all
operations but you'll likely want much finer granularity. This bugbear
comes up periodically, particularly when using buffers for cases that
they weren't really designed for. Stuart pointed out the lack of
absolute bulk get/put operations which is something that I think will
help some of these cases.
Also, can you explain what you mean by confinement? (thread confinement?).
Yes, thread vs. global. I haven't been following Panama close enough to
say how this is exposed in the API.
Also, I don't think I would label this API an attempt to develop a file
system. I think that's rather and overblown characterisation of what it
does.
I think you may have mis-read my mail as was just picking another
example where MBB would be problematic.
:
I'm still not quite sure where this reply leaves the JEP though. Shall I
update the Risks and Assumptions section to include mention of
JDK-5029431 as suggested to Stuart? Is there anything else I can do to
progress things?
It wouldn't do any harm to have this section mention that an alternative
that exposes a more memory centric API may be possible in the future.
-Alan
