Relativistic programming: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 00:49, 16 February 2021

Revision as of 15:44, 13 March 2021

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{{Programming paradigms}}

'''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, there may be some cases where one thread sees two events in a different order than another thread (hence the term relativistic because in [[Special relativity|Einstein's theory of special relativity]] {{citation needed|reason= This is not referenced in the source|date=December 2015}} the order of events is not always the same to different viewers). This essentially implies working under [[causal consistency]] instead of a stronger model.

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]] (over 9,000 times {{as of|2014|03|lc=on}} and has grown from nothing to 8% of all locking primitives in about a decade).<ref>{{citeCite web|title=RCU Linux Usage|url=http://www.rdrop.com/users/paulmck/RCU/linuxusage.html |titleauthor=RCUPaul Linux UsageE. McKenney|accessdateaccess-date=December 20142021-03-13|website=www.rdrop.com}}</ref>

== See also ==