The Joy of Clojure

Chapter 11. Mutation

 

This chapter covers

• Software transactional memory with multiversion concurrency control and snapshot isolation
• When to use Refs
• When to use Agents
• When to use Atoms
• When to use locks
• When to use futures
• When to use promises
• Parallelism
• Vars and dynamic binding

 

Clojure’s main tenet isn’t the facilitation of concurrency. Instead, Clojure at its core is concerned with the sane management of state, and facilitating concurrent programming naturally falls out of that. The JVM operates on a shared-state concurrency model built around juggling fine-grained locks that protect access to shared data. Even if you can keep all of your locks in order, rarely does such a strategy scale well, and even less frequently does it foster ...