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Lock-free atom garbage collection for multithreaded Prolog
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 October 2016
Abstract
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The runtime system of dynamic languages such as Prolog or Lisp and their derivatives contain a symbol table, in Prolog often called the atom table. A simple dynamically resizing hash-table used to be an adequate way to implement this table. As Prolog becomes fashionable for 24 × 7 server processes we need to deal with atom garbage collection and concurrent access to the atom table. Classical lock-based implementations to ensure consistency of the atom table scale poorly and a stop-the-world approach to implement atom garbage collection quickly becomes a bottle-neck, making Prolog unsuitable for soft real-time applications. In this article we describe a novel implementation for the atom table using lock-free techniques where the atom-table remains accessible even during atom garbage collection. Relying only on CAS (Compare And Swap) and not on external libraries, the implementation is straightforward and portable.
Information
- Type
- Regular Papers
- Information
- Theory and Practice of Logic Programming , Volume 16 , Special Issue 5-6: 32nd International Conference on Logic Programming , September 2016 , pp. 950 - 965
- Copyright
- Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016
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