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philippta | 3 months ago

The fundamental problem here is shared memory / shared ownership.

If you assign exclusive ownership of all accounting data to a single thread and use CSP to communicate transfers, all of these made up problems go away.

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gpderetta|3 months ago

This is equivalent of using a single global lock (and STM is semantically equivalent, just theoretically more scalable). It obviously works, but greatly limits scalability by serializing all operations.

Also in practice the CSP node that is providing access control is effectively implementing shared memory (in an extremely inefficient way).

The fundamental problem is not shared memory, it is concurrent access control.

There's no silver bullet.

mrkeen|3 months ago

Yes, multithreaded problems go away on a single thread.

Is there any way for an external thread to ask (via CSP) for the state, think about the state, then write back the new state (via CSP)?

If so, you're back to race conditions - with the additional constraints of a master thread and CSP.

philippta|3 months ago

That would be shared ownership again.

torginus|3 months ago

CSP suffers from backpressure issues (which is not to say its bad, but it's not a panacea either)