important news: refocusing discussion

[Tomasz Zielonka]

On Tue, Mar 28, 2006 at 12:24:09AM +0100, Ross Paterson wrote:
> How about STM (minus retry/orElse) and TVars as the portable interface?
> They're trivial for a single-threaded implementation, and provide a
> comfortable interface for everyone.

It may be relevant for this discussion: I believe I reimplemented STM,
including retry and orElse, on top of old GHC's concurrency primitives.
I say 'believe' because I didn't prove it's correct, and I only
performed limited testing. However, it shouldn't be too surprising that
it was possible - after all if STM can be implemented in C, why couldn't
it be implemented in Haskell/GHC itself?

The code is here in a darcs repo:
    http://www.uncurry.com/repos/FakeSTM/

Perhaps it could serve as a drop-in replacement for STM in haskell
compilers which don't implement STM directly.

Best regards
Tomasz