[DGD] Re: Net Security

[Felix A. Croes]

Logic <logic at logic.net> wrote:
>[...]
> Dworkin, on that subject: do you have a preliminary concept of what
> your threaded LPC will look like? Will the LPC programmer see much of
> this, or will a lot of it be hidden behind the scenes? How about locking
> concepts (semaphores), and the atomicity of calls to kfuns, other objects,
> etc? Inquiring minds are -really- interested. :-)

It will not look threaded.  The basic idea is that several LPC threads
will be running at the same time, each working on a local copy of all
available data.  Out of several threads depending on the same data,
only the first thread to complete will succeed; the others will fail
and will be restarted later.  Only the changes made by the successful
thread will be committed.  As a result, the system will still appear
to be single-threaded, from inside the system; instead of a sequence
of threads, there is now a sequence of commits.

Of course, this is only worthwhile if you don't have to restart
threads too often, and if you can run several threads simultaneously
(i.e. on a multiprocessor system, such as my PC here).  There are
other complications, but I will save them for a later posting.

Regards,
Dworkin