[MLton] Transactions for ML

[Suresh Jagannathan]

On Apr 20, 2007, at 1:53 AM, Daniel C. Wang wrote:

> Not to start a flame war about STM, but if you dig deep into the  
> semantics it's not clear that it actually makes writing concurrent  
> programs any easier. It probably makes writing *shared memory*  
> based concurrent programs easier. However, if you're programming in  
> SML and not something like C there are so many other ways to do  
> concurrency better that STM is not an obvious win.
>

It's certainly true that most STM work to date has focussed on shared- 
memory
based concurrent programs, but it's not the case that STM techniques  
can't be useful in other
contexts as well.  For example, Donnelly and Fluet's Transactional  
Events paper
(ICFP'06), and to a lesser extent, the stabilizer abstraction (also  
presented at ICFP'06)
show the benefit of preserving atomicity and isolation for message- 
passing (CML-style)
concurrent applications.

-- Suresh