DiffArray Performance

[Duncan Coutts]

On Tue, 2003-11-04 at 13:41, Alastair Reid wrote:
> I was thinking that, if the current mutex implementation is killing 
> performance (and it is an assumption - though one of the Simons could 
> probably confirm or deny it), we should look to see if mutexes can be made 
> cheaper or rewrite the code to avoid it or ...  For example, the Java 
> community has done a lot of work on how to make it cheap to take an 
> uncontested lock but more expensive to take a contested lock.

In the next Linux kernel (2.6.x) you can implement mutexes using
'futex'es which in the uncontested case cost 1 atomic memory
increment/decrement operation plus 1 register to register comparison.

In the contested case it still requires a kernel call. Of course this is
for mutexes for OS threads/processes. An implementation for a pure user
space thread implementation like ghc's might be even simpler / cheaper
(although it'd be hard to find an implementation cheaper than 1 atomic
memory operation!).

Duncan