• swym: Are we lock-free yet?

  24 Jun 2019

  No. swym is a transactional memory library that prioritizes performance. It’s not lock-free, but it does have progress guarantees. This post will explore some of the recent work on swym’s progress promises, as well as some comparisons with non-blocking algorithms. I’m not an expert on schedulers or OS’s, so please...

• Generalizing Seqlocks

  24 Mar 2019

  The swym Algorithm swym is a very performant Software Transactional Memory (STM) library. It uses a variation on the per-object Transactional Locking II algorithm. The paper does an excellent job explaining the algorithm, but it is not required reading for this article. swym is a generalization of seqlocks - one...

• Writing the Perfect `Collect` Trait

  05 Apr 2018

  I’ve been spending some time thinking about garbage collection in rust. I know, shame on me, it’s a systems language, we hate garbage collection, but… even in a systems programming language, garbage collection is still pretty damn useful. Hell, even the linux kernel has call_rcu. Garbage Collection Let’s start with...