> avoid the use of mutex […] It turns out it is always possible

How would you handle the archetypical example of a money transfer between two bank accounts, in which 100 units of money need to be subtracted from one account and atomically added to another account, after checking that the first account contains at least 100 units?

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vrmiguel an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Since the thread mentions Rust: in Rust, you often replace Mutexes with channels.

In your case, you could have a channel where the Receiver is the only part of the code that transfers anything. It'd receive a message Transfer { from: Account, to: Account, amount: Amount } and do the required work. Any other threads would therefore only have copies of the Sender handle. Concurrent sends would be serialized through the queue's buffering.

I'm not suggesting this is an ideal way of doing it

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galangalalgol 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The simplest pure functional way would be to copy the whole database instantiating a new copy with the desired change if the condition was met. That obviously doesn't scale, which is where the performance thing comes in. A still pure way would be to use a persistent tree or hash mapped trie that allows efficient reuse of the original db. There are times a purely functional approach doesn't perform well enough, but even with large scale entity component type systems in both rust and c++, the number of times I've had to use a mutex to be performant is small. Atomic is much more common, but still not common. Persistent data structures alleviate most of the need.

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pas 4 hours ago | parent [-]

pure or not eventually this comes down to durability, no?

and the way to do it is to either have some kind single-point-of-control (designated actor or single-threaded executor) or mark the data (ie. use some concurrency control primitive either wrapping the data or in some dedicated place where the executors check [like JVM's safepoints])

using consistent hashing these hypothetical accounts could be allocated to actors and then each transaction is managed by the actor of the source (ie. where the money is sent from, where the check needs to happen), with their own durable WAL, and periodically these are aggregated

(or course then the locking is hidden in the maintenance of the hashring as eating philosophers are added/removed)

	▲	kragen 20 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Eliminating the durability constraint doesn't make it any easier to program, just easier to get good performance on. Distributing accounts among different actors, without two-phase commit or its moral equivalent, enables check kiting.