In this talk I'll introduce the work that I've been doing with, Maurice Herlihy, Simon Marlow and Simon Peyton Jones on concurrent programming without locks. In this work we've been building alternative abstractions based on lock-free transactional memory which we believe substantially raises the level of abstraction when developing concurrent software. It avoids the programmer needing to think about when to acquire and release locks, it avoids lock-induced deadlock and it avoids the scalability-vs-simplicity tradeoffs that are associated with lock-based design.
Bio: Tim Harris is a Researcher at Microsoft Research Cambridge where he works on concurrent algorithms and new abstractions for concurrent programming. Previously he was a lecturer in the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory where he gained his BA and PhD degrees. He is a co-author of the undergraduate textbook "Operating Systems" published by Pearson and is a Teaching Fellow at Churchill College, Cambridge, UK.