Joe Duffy regularly posts amazing material which is well ahead of our time, such as his current blog post series about Midori.
I’d like to call out this particular assertion made by him way back in 2010:
[D]evelopers must move towards single-threaded programming models connected through message passing, optionally with provably race-free fine-grained parallelism inside of those single-threaded worlds.
Add “async/await everywhere” and you can sign me up!
Here’s why I try to avoid thread-based programming models for expressing concurrency:
The opponents of thread-based systems line up several drawbacks. For Ousterhout, who probably published the most well-known rant against threads [Ous96], the extreme difficulty of developing correct concurrent code–even for programming experts–is the most harmful trait of threads. As soon as a multi-threaded system shares a single state between multiple threads, coordination and synchronization becomes an imperative. Coordination and synchronization requires locking primitives, which in turn brings along additional issues.
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A reader-writer lock is a lock which will allow multiple concurrent readers but only one writer. A reader-writer lock can be significantly more efficient than a standard mutex if reads on your shared memory far outnumber writes.
Reader-writer locks naturally fit together with caches, as caches are only effective if reads far outnumber writes.
Here is a general pattern for using a reader-writer lock with a cache:
Acquire a reader lock.
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