Optimizations for mutable structures?

[Jan-Willem Maessen]

On Dec 8, 2005, at 5:15 AM, Seth Kurtzberg wrote:

> [Discussion of the appropriate role of fairness.]
> The fundamental requirement is the same for all languages, I believe;
> the concurrently executing threads must produce a system state that is
> identical to _one_ system state which would be produced by running the
> threads sequentially.  It is easy to show that to even enumerate  
> all the
> possible sequences is NP-complete.  Beyond the requirement of
> serializability, there is no practical alternative to a dose of human
> intelligence.

I'd point out that we're lucky if we even get serializability on most  
machines.  That's a pretty strong guarantee.

-Jan-Willem Maessen

> At least people coding in Haskell have an understanding
> of the underlying issues.  Alas, this is far from true for even
> experiences coders of imperative languages.
>
> Seth