[PRL] "Threads Considered Harmful" in the news

[Mitchell Wand]

Can you give an example of a nondeterminstically-composable component?

--Mitch

On 1/23/07, William D Clinger <will at ccs.neu.edu> wrote:
> >From the article Mitch quoted:
>
> > ....In it, he observes that threads remove determinism and open the door
> > to subtle yet deadly bugs, and that while the problems were to some extent
> > manageable on single core systems, threads on multicore systems will magnify
> > the problems out of control. He suggests the only solution is to stop
> > bolting parallelism onto languages and components--instead design new
> > deterministically-composable components and languages.
>
> That's reactionary.  Determinism has never been
> fundamental, and attempts to return to the Eden
> where we could pretend it was will fail.  What
> we need are nondeterministically-composable
> components and languages.
>
> Will
>
>