ezyang’s blog

the arc of software bends towards understanding

When a lock is better than an MVar

MVars are an amazingly flexible synchronization primitive, which can serve as locks, one-place channels, barriers, etc. or be used to form higher-level abstractions. As far as flexibility is concerned, MVars are the superior choice of primitive for the runtime system to implement—as opposed to just implementing, say, a lock. However, I was recently thinking about […]

  • January 7, 2014