Topic: "Performance Needs Actors"

We at ThoughtWorks are delighted to invite you to our latest GeekNight. An exciting talk about cutting edge technology and tons of learning await you! You also get to meet like-minded geeks in a space that encourages open discussions with fellow technologists.

Concurrency idioms such as locks and monitors are well understood. However, building highly concurrent systems is a black art; the finer the grain of sharing and locking, the more error-prone the system, and difficult to diagnose. The situation is much worse in multi-processor systems, even in languages like Java with well-defined memory model semantics.

This talk argues for a fundamentally different way of building highly concurrent systems, be they device drivers or servers. It argues for ultra-lightweight threads with isolated heaps and stacks, communicating with each other purely through messages, and not via modifying shared data structures. This notion is not new by any means, but the devil is in the details.

Sriram Srinivasan will present Kilim, a framework in Java that provides these features, along with guaranteeing low level safety at compile time via a type system, and contrast it to languages such as Erlang and Go.

Speaker Profile

Sriram Srinivasan has spent the last 20 years working on communications and middleware technologies. As a principal engineer at WebLogic (acquired by BEA, then Oracle), he wrote the world's first distributed transactions and EJB frameworks. His book "Advanced Perl Programming" spent quality time on Amazon's top-50 list. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from Cambridge.

Who Should Attend
Language Geeks, Technologists

About GeekNights
Informal meetings for tech people to exchange ideas, code and learning. Held periodically at ThoughtWorks offices in Bangalore, Pune and Chennai.

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