Relativistic programming: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 01:33, 26 June 2011

Revision as of 19:28, 22 August 2011

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{{Notability|date=May 2011}}

'''Relativistic programming''' ('''RP''') is a style of [[concurrent programming]] where instead of trying to avoid conflicts between readers and writers (or writers and writers in some cases) the algorithm is designed to tolerate them and get a correct result regardless of the order of events. Also relativistic programming algorithms are designed to work without the presences of a global order of events. That is in some there maybe cases where one thread sees a two events in a different order thenthan another thread (hence the term relativistic because in [[Special relativity|Einstein's relativity]] order of events is not always the same to different viewers).

Relativistic programming provides advantages in performance compared to other concurrency paradigms because it does not require one thread to wait for another nearly as often. Because of this, forms of it ([[Read-Copy-Update]] for instance) are now used extensively in the [[Linux kernel]] (more than 5,000 times {{as of|2011|lc=on}}).<ref>http://www.rdrop.com/users/paulmck/RCU/linuxusage.html</ref>