Robust Distributed Software Transactions for Haskell : Freedom from Deadlock without the Headache

In recent years speed improvements of single computer processors are coming close to physical barriers. Consequently concurrent and distributed computer designs become more and more important. In addition, many real-life applications are distributed by nature. They either control geographically wide spread hardware resources or utilize redundant hardware components to minimize system failure. However, applications, written for those systems, require a synchronization mechanism to avoid deadlocks, a problem feared among program designers. This book motivates and develops a robust distributed Software Transactional Memory (STM) library for Haskell. STM is an abstraction for synchronizing shared resources in concurrent applications. It helps to prevent deadlocks and thus facilitates composing program code. Frank Kupke extends the STM abstraction to distributed systems and presents in this book an implementation efficient enough to be used in soft real-time applications. Further, the implemented library is robust in itself, offering the application developer a high abstraction level to realize robustness, hence, significantly simplifying this, in general, complex task.