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Showing posts from October, 2011

The Most General Concurrent API

Concurrent programming is hard, and many abstractions have been developed over the years to properly manage concurrent resources. The .NET base class libraries have mutexes, spinlocks, semaphores, compare-and-set (CAS) instructions, and more. The Problem Unfortunately, many of these standard abstractions are rather opaque, so predicting their behaviour is difficult, and enforcing a particular thread schedule is nearly impossible. For example, consider the issue of "fairness". Many abstractions to deal with threads are not fair, which is to say that they are not guaranteed to release threads in FIFO order, so a thread could starve . Furthermore, these opaque abstractions do not allow the application to easily specify domain-specific scheduling behaviour. Suppose threads T0, T1, and T2 are blocked on a resource X, in that order. X becomes available, and according to FIFO order, T0 should acquire control next. However, a domain-specific requirement may state that T2 should