Atoms and references
- by StackedCrooked
According to the book Programming Clojure refs manage coordinated, synchronous changes to shared state and atoms manage uncoordinated, synchronous changes to shared state.
If I understood correctly "coordinated" implies multiple changes are encapsulated as one atomic operation. If that is the case then it seems to me that coordination only requires using a dosync call.
For example what is the difference between:
(def i (atom 0))
(def j (atom 0))
(dosync
(swap! i inc)
(swap! j dec))
and:
(def i (ref 0))
(def j (ref 0))
(dosync
(alter i inc)
(alter j dec))
