Hi, I've checked a number of changes to the transactional memory support into GHC head:
1. The main change is to add support for dynamically checked data invariants of the kind described in http://research.microsoft.com/~tharris/papers/2006-transact.pdf. There are two operations: "always X :: STM Bool -> STM ()" and "alwaysSucceeds X :: STM a -> STM ()". Invariants are expressed as STM actions which must hold (i) when passed to always/alwaysSucceeds, and (ii) at the point that every subsequent transaction commits. An invariant passed to "always" signals failure by returning False or by raising an exception. An invariant passed to "alwaysSucceeds" signals failure just by raising an exception. Tests conc062 and conc063 try out some corner cases, and the paper discusses the details (what if an invariant calls "retry", what if it updates TVars, what if it loops, and so on etc...) 2. If an atomic block contains "catch X Y" and X raises an exception then the exception is passed to Y after rolling back the effects of X. Previously we would retain the effects of X, requiring the programmer to manually compensate for the portion of X that had run before raising the exception. Rolling back X seems more consistent with the treatment of exceptions that propagate out of atomic blocks, and the argument that transactional memory can bring ease-of-programming benefits by automating the construction of compensating code for memory operations. The post-publication version of the "Composable memory transactions" paper has more details http://research.microsoft.com/~tharris/papers/2005-ppopp-composable.pdf. Test conc061 tests some of the corner cases. 3. There are some bug-fixes to the implementation of "X `orElse` Y" in which, under high contention, X and Y may not appear to execute against the same view of the heap. I'm not sure if this problem has ever come up in practice! We'd love to hear about it if you're using these features, Cheers, Tim _______________________________________________ Haskell mailing list Haskell@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell
