clojurestm

Do both alter and ref-set update the STM tree in Clojure?

I am using refs everywhere in my Clojure code and then I realised I was using ref-set everywhere. Does this destroy the history of changes in the STM? Or should I be using alter only and ref-set to intialise the ref?

I am not sure if the difference is merely syntactical and alter ends up calling ref-set anyway. Can someone enlighten me?

Solution 
  • (alter aref f arg1 ... argn)

    is basically the same as

    (ref-set aref (f @aref arg1 ... argn))

    Similar for atoms with reset! and swap!.