I agree with the author: it's a shame that TVars aren't catching on in more languages. They are a great idea from the database world, that we could use in the rest of computing, too.
I agree with the author: it's a shame that TVars aren't catching on in more languages. They are a great idea from the database world, that we could use in the rest of computing, too.
The entire programming (or even computing) ecosystem suffers from this issue where very useful ideas don't always propagate across domains even though they just make a whole lot of sense. I'm not sure if it's because they truly wouldn't work out in practice, or if it's just a discovery/communication thing.
One thing that I think do affect things, is that language design discussions tend to be concentrated into their own communities based on the programming language itself, rather than one "programming language discussions" place where everyone can easier cross-pollinate ideas across languages. Luckily, there are some individuals who move between communities without effort, which does lead to a bit of ideas making it across, but it feels like we're missing out on so much evolution and ideas from various languages across the ecosystem.
> Luckily, there are some individuals who move between communities without effort, [...]
Oh, many of these travelers spend a lot of effort!
It's discovery and communication. Public education for adults is way under-appreciated in many many scopes.
The cross-fertilization of ideas across computer science domains is more limited than I think people assume. Databases are just one area that contains a lot of good ideas that never seem to leak into other parts of the software world.
Supercomputing is another domain that has deep insights into scalable systems that is famously so insular that ideas rarely cross over into mainstream scalable systems. My detour through supercomputing probably added as much to my database design knowledge as anything I actually did in databases.
The canonical industrial explanation “why not” is probably this 2010 piece from Joe Duffy @ Microsoft:
http://joeduffyblog.com/2010/01/03/a-brief-retrospective-on-...
I don’t think we read the same thing.
> Models can be pulled along other axes, however, such as whether memory locations must be tagged in order to be used in a transaction or not, etc. Haskell requires this tagging (via TVars) so that side-effects are evident in the type system as with any other kind of monad. We quickly settled on unbounded transactions.
Snip
> In hindsight, this was a critical decision that had far-reaching implications. And to be honest, I now frequently doubt that it was the right call. We had our hearts in the right places, and the entire industry was trekking down the same path at the same time (with the notable exception of Haskell)
So basically not that TM isn’t workable, but unbounded TM is likely a fool’s errand but Haskell’s is bounded TM that requires explicit annotation of memory that will participate in atomicity.
It is a big reason why I picked Scala3/Zio over Rust for my most recent project.
Well, what means to support, truly, TVars?
Is easy, or hard?
Demand a new paradigm at large, or is only a inconvenience in the few places is used?
Because if the answer is "turns the language into Haskell" then is a big NOPE!