3 ms·
The problem, in every case I can think of (and it intuitively seems true), is continuation, whether it's done in software with coroutines or in hardware with pr
by eropple 9y ago
The problem, in every case I can think of (and it intuitively seems true), is continuation, whether it's done in software with coroutines or in hardware with process scheduling/threads. Which is a concurrency problem rather than a parallelism problem, which then expands to "are problems of linearizability concurrency or parallelism?". Which might be a more settled way to answer the question in a CS manner.
Can you describe a race condition that cannot be replicated on a single thread with either preemptive or cooperative multitasking/coroutines? I'm racking my brain and can't come up with one. If your coroutines are deterministically given time, then I guess you can avoid race conditions, but "are my coroutines deterministic" seems like a really difficult thing to conclusively prove in all cases (like, just add network I/O latency), and the conceptual barrier remains the same whether they're deterministic or not.
(Edit: a friend just noted the possibility of writing to memory/disk and reading halfway through, and if you don't have atomic writes that's true, but you can have preemptive, single-process multitasking that interrupts mid-write; that's why we have file system lockfiles, isn't it?)
I use node-async-locks when writing JavaScript sometimes if I have to deal with shared state, because, hey, I might have to await something and come back to this later. (Obviously I try not to, because duh, but sometimes you're stuck with it and can't immutable-all-the-things. So you define a critical section and do your thing.)