Lambda the Ultimate

Reagents: Expressing and Composing Fine-grained Concurrency, by Aaron Turon:

Efficient communication and synchronization is crucial for finegrained parallelism. Libraries providing such features, while indispensable, are difficult to write, and often cannot be tailored or composed to meet the needs of specific users. We introduce reagents, a set of combinators for concisely expressing concurrency algorithms. Reagents scale as well as their hand-coded counterparts, while providing the composability existing libraries lack.

This is a pretty neat approach to writing concurrent code, which lies somewhere between manually implementing low-level concurrent algorithms and STM. Concurrent algorithms are expressed and composed semi-naively, and Reagents automates the retries for you in case of thread interference (for transient failure of CAS updates), or they block waiting for input from another thread (in case of permanent failure where no input is available).

The core seems to be k-CAS with synchronous communication between threads to coordinate reactions on shared state. The properties seem rather nice, as Aaron describes:

When used in isolation, reagents are guaranteed to perform only the CASes that the hand-written algorithm would, so they introduce no overhead on shared-memory operations; by recoding an algorithm use reagents, you lose nothing. Yet unlike hand-written algorithms, reagents can be composed using choice, tailored with new blocking behavior, or combined into larger atomic blocks.

The benchmarks in section 6 look promising. This appears to be work towards Aaron's thesis which provides many more details.