Software Engineering Radio

Recording Venue: OOPSLA 2007
Guest(s): Dan Grossman

Host(s): Markus
This episode features a discussion with Dan Grossman about an essay paper he wrote for this year’s OOPSLA conference. The paper is about an analogy between garbage collection and transactional memory. In addition to seeing the beauty of the analogy, the discussion also serves as a good introduction to transactional memory (which was mentioned in the Goetz/Holmes episode) and – to some extent – to garbage collection.

Links:

• Wikipedia on Garbage Collection
• A unified theory of garbage collection
• Transactional memory: architectural support for lock-free data structures
• The paper on which this episode is based. You should read it to see the full beauty of the analogy
• Wikipedia on Transactional Memory

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Recording Venue: OOPSLA 2006
Guest(s): Brian Goetz
David Holmes

Host(s): Markus
This is another episode on concurrency. We talk to two experts in the field, Brian Goetz and David Holmes about aspects of concurrency we hadn’t really covered before.

We start out by discussing liveness and safety and then continue to talk about synchronizers (latches, barriers, semaphores) as well as the importance of agreeing on protocols when developing concurrent applications. We then talked about thread confinement as a way of building thread-safe programs, as well as using functional programming and immutable data. The next set of topics covers various ways of how compilers can optimize the performance wrt. to concurrency, talking about techniques such as escape analysis as well as lock elision and coarsening. We then covered how to test concurrent programs and the consequences of the Java memory model on concurrency. We then went on to look at some more advanced topics, namely, lock-free programming and atomic variables. We also briefly discussed the idea of transactional memory.

Finally, we looked at how better language support – specifically, a more declarative style of concurrent programming as e.g. in the Fortress language – can aid in improving the quality of concurrent programs.

Links:

• Brian’s Homepage
• The book, Java Concurrency in Practice

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