Ask HN: What's your favorite lock free data structure?

8 pointsmrburton7 comments

STM in Haskell is quite nice. I only had a quick play with it, and it was quite a while ago, but the idea IIRC is that you can put messages on Queues called Channels and then consume them.

Here is something I knocked up: https://github.com/mcapodici/haskelllearn/tree/master/stocke...

Fairly certain STM is implemented with locks, at least weiteSets are.

Ah perhaps. It certainly nicer than an explicit locks in "business" code

Sure. But in this context I assume the question is about a specific class of algorithm:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-blocking_algorithm

Lots of abstractions ‘hide’ the locks from you. Very few are lock free.

Ring buffer. When it comes to multithreading, I avoid using things like semaphores, mutexes and locks.

Why do you avoid mutexes and locks? Are they just hard to make bug free when you start scaling them up?

For me, multithreading is um complicated. I told someone once that I view people who say that “multithreading is easy” the same way I view a young man who says “I understand women.”

All kidding aside, most programs require some sort of multithreading but the ones I write haven’t needed explicit mutex, semaphores or locks. (And I’ve been doing this 30+ years.)

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