May 19th, 2010 — The Anatomy of Message Passing — Bartosz Milewski

Abstract

The message passing paradigm makes multithreaded programming safer. In this talk I’ll be trying to get to the bottom of message passing— finding low level primitives from which a variety of message queues or mailboxes may be built. I’ll make a few digressions into Haskell’s MVars and OCaml’s channels, but mainly I’ll talk about C++. I’ll show you how to separate synchronization from message storage for a composable and type-safe system.

Bio

I’m one part physicist, one part software engineer, and one part computer scientist. I have a Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics; I worked for Microsoft and for my own company, Reliable Software; and I frequent graduate seminars in programming languages at the University of Washington. I also keep a blog at http://BartoszMilewski.wordpress.com, mostly about concurrent programming.