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There seems to be a lot of voodoo beliefs around concurrent programming that lead to really bad things. One of the best books I've read on it is Java concurren

There seems to be a lot of voodoo beliefs around concurrent programming that lead to really bad things. One of the best books I've read on it is Java concurrency in practice [1]. It does an excellent job of dispelling these occultic beliefs and letting the reader know exactly when and how concurrency should be implemented. It is applicable to more languages than just java, especially since many have adopted large parts of the java memory model. The worst things I usually find when reviewing concurrent code is people either not using locks when they should, using locks when they shouldn't, and having inconsistent data guards. I've seen people throw in random locks to guard local non-shared state which is just crazy town but "Multiple threads are running this code, so I'm adding a lock". I certainly prefer message passing over shared state. However, it's a little baffling to me why it's so hard for devs to grasp how to properly maintain shared state. Instead of just learning the basic rules, it gets couched in "It's just too hard to understand so keep adding things until it works". [1] https://www.amazon.com/Java-Concurrency-Practice-Brian-Goetz/dp/0321349601 https://www.amazon.com/Java-Concurrency-Practice-Brian-Goetz...

deleted 2y ago
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LegionMammal978 2y ago
> However, it's a little baffling to me why it's so hard for devs to grasp how to properly maintain shared state. Instead of just learning the basic rules, it gets couched in "It's just too hard to understand so keep adding things until it works". Probably because most people aren't aware that there are basic rules to be learned. I'd imagine the typical experience is, you're very familiar with single-threaded code, and now you're trying to let other threads work with your data. You have heard that there are many pitfalls, and that there are special-purpose tools like mutexes to avoid those, but you look at the examples and find them mostly baffling. "Why do they perform these incantations for this data but not that data, or in this place but not that place?" So you come up with some weird mental model and move on with your life, never aware that there are underlying principles for maintaining shared state. Personally, I didn't understand mutexes very well at all, until I started looking into what the atomic memory orderings from C++ et al. were supposed to mean.
- Maxatar 2y ago
  Not too sure what the basic rules are and I'm not able to find any list of such rules. For me the biggest challenge when sharing state is that the only benefit I can see for parallelism is performance, so if I'm not gaining performance there is no reason to use parallelism. If I use coarse-grained mutexes then I end up with straight forward to reason about code but I lose the performance benefit and in fact can end up with slower than single threaded code. If I use very fine grained mutexes then I end up with faster code that has very hard to find bugs that happen on very rare occasion. And then on top of that even if you do write correct fine grained locking, you can still end up with slow code due to cache behavior such as false sharing and cache coherence. So ultimately I disagree that writing parallel code is simple unless you're willing to give up performance in which case you may as well just stick to single threaded code or use parallelism among independent data. Writing correct parallel software that shares state and actually delivers substantial performance benefits is incredibly difficult, and I am skeptical that there is a set of simple rules that one can simply read about.
  - tialaramex 2y ago
    > Not too sure what the basic rules are and I'm not able to find any list of such rules. The actual rules are completely terrifying because they involve the physics of microprocessors. If you've watched Grace Hopper's lectures where she gives out physical nanoseconds (pieces of wire that are the same length as the distance light travels in a nanosecond, thus, the maximum possible distance data could travel in that time) you can start to appreciate the problem. It is literally impossible for the intuitive Sequentially Consistent model of how computers work to apply for today's fast yet concurrent processors. Light is too slow. However generally people mean either Java's memory model or the C++ 11 (and subsequently 14, 17, 20) memory models used in languages such as C++, C and Rust. Those rules are less terrifying but still pretty complicated and the programming language promises to somehow provide an environment where these rules (not the terrifying ones) are all you need to know to write software. So that's nice. It can be simple to write parallel code for a language designed to make that easy. Yes even if there's shared data. It only started to get trickier if the shared data is modified, so long as it isn't we can make copies of it safely and modern CPUs will do that without actual work by the programmer.
f1shy 2y ago
Maybe because I had a complete semester of multiprogramming in the uni, I see almost trivial to work in such environments, and cannot comprehend why is so much mystic and voodo. Actually is pretty simple.
- tombert 2y ago
  I feel like it's not terribly hard to write something that more or less works using mutexes and the like, but I find it exceedingly hard to debug. You're at the mercy of timing and the scheduler, meaning that often just throwing a breakpoint and stepping through isn't as easy as it would be with a sequential program. I feel like with a queue or messaging abstraction, it can be easier to debug. Generally your actual work is being done on a single thread, meaning that traditional debugging tools work fine, and as I've said in sibling comments, I also just think it's easier to reason about what's going on.
tombert 2y ago
+1 for the Java Concurrency in Practice book. It's the book I recommend to nearly everyone who wants to get into concurrent programming. Goetz makes it a lot more approachable than most other books.
- hinkley 2y ago
  Goetz has come a long way. I knew one of the people who contributed to that book and he was a little frustrated about having to explain things to him he felt he shouldn’t have had to. The implication was he’d already had this conversation with some of the other contributors. Sometimes though, the newbie is going to write the clearest documentation.
hinkley 2y ago
I loved concurrent code when I was starting out. I’d taken a pretty good distributed computing class which started the ball rolling. They just fit into how my brain worked very well. Then I had to explain my code to other devs, either before or after they broke it, and over and over I got the message that I was being too clever. I’ve been writing Grug-brained concurrent code for so long I’m not sure I can still do the fancy shit anymore, but I’m okay with that. In fact I know I implemented multiple reader single writer at least a few times and that came back to me during this thread but I still can’t remember how I implemented it.
- tombert 2y ago
  That's something I'm afraid of for my latest project. I did some concurrent stuff that wasn't 100% clear would actually work, and I had to write a PlusCal spec to exhaustively prove to myself that what I was doing is actually OK. It works pretty well, and I'm getting decent speeds, but I'm really scared someone is going to come and "fix" all my code by doing it the "normal" way, and thus slow everything down. I've been trying to comment the hell out of everything, and I've shared the PlusCal spec, but no one else on my team knows PlusCal and I feel like most engineers don't actually read comments, so I think it's an inevitability that my baby is killed.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

LegionMammal978 2y ago

> However, it's a little baffling to me why it's so hard for devs to grasp how to properly maintain shared state. Instead of just learning the basic rules, it gets couched in "It's just too hard to understand so keep adding things until it works". Probably because most people aren't aware that there are basic rules to be learned. I'd imagine the typical experience is, you're very familiar with single-threaded code, and now you're trying to let other threads work with your data. You have heard that there are many pitfalls, and that there are special-purpose tools like mutexes to avoid those, but you look at the examples and find them mostly baffling. "Why do they perform these incantations for this data but not that data, or in this place but not that place?" So you come up with some weird mental model and move on with your life, never aware that there are underlying principles for maintaining shared state. Personally, I didn't understand mutexes very well at all, until I started looking into what the atomic memory orderings from C++ et al. were supposed to mean.

Maxatar 2y ago
Not too sure what the basic rules are and I'm not able to find any list of such rules. For me the biggest challenge when sharing state is that the only benefit I can see for parallelism is performance, so if I'm not gaining performance there is no reason to use parallelism. If I use coarse-grained mutexes then I end up with straight forward to reason about code but I lose the performance benefit and in fact can end up with slower than single threaded code. If I use very fine grained mutexes then I end up with faster code that has very hard to find bugs that happen on very rare occasion. And then on top of that even if you do write correct fine grained locking, you can still end up with slow code due to cache behavior such as false sharing and cache coherence. So ultimately I disagree that writing parallel code is simple unless you're willing to give up performance in which case you may as well just stick to single threaded code or use parallelism among independent data. Writing correct parallel software that shares state and actually delivers substantial performance benefits is incredibly difficult, and I am skeptical that there is a set of simple rules that one can simply read about.
- tialaramex 2y ago
  > Not too sure what the basic rules are and I'm not able to find any list of such rules. The actual rules are completely terrifying because they involve the physics of microprocessors. If you've watched Grace Hopper's lectures where she gives out physical nanoseconds (pieces of wire that are the same length as the distance light travels in a nanosecond, thus, the maximum possible distance data could travel in that time) you can start to appreciate the problem. It is literally impossible for the intuitive Sequentially Consistent model of how computers work to apply for today's fast yet concurrent processors. Light is too slow. However generally people mean either Java's memory model or the C++ 11 (and subsequently 14, 17, 20) memory models used in languages such as C++, C and Rust. Those rules are less terrifying but still pretty complicated and the programming language promises to somehow provide an environment where these rules (not the terrifying ones) are all you need to know to write software. So that's nice. It can be simple to write parallel code for a language designed to make that easy. Yes even if there's shared data. It only started to get trickier if the shared data is modified, so long as it isn't we can make copies of it safely and modern CPUs will do that without actual work by the programmer.

f1shy 2y ago

Maybe because I had a complete semester of multiprogramming in the uni, I see almost trivial to work in such environments, and cannot comprehend why is so much mystic and voodo. Actually is pretty simple.

tombert 2y ago
I feel like it's not terribly hard to write something that more or less works using mutexes and the like, but I find it exceedingly hard to debug. You're at the mercy of timing and the scheduler, meaning that often just throwing a breakpoint and stepping through isn't as easy as it would be with a sequential program. I feel like with a queue or messaging abstraction, it can be easier to debug. Generally your actual work is being done on a single thread, meaning that traditional debugging tools work fine, and as I've said in sibling comments, I also just think it's easier to reason about what's going on.

tombert 2y ago

+1 for the Java Concurrency in Practice book. It's the book I recommend to nearly everyone who wants to get into concurrent programming. Goetz makes it a lot more approachable than most other books.

hinkley 2y ago
Goetz has come a long way. I knew one of the people who contributed to that book and he was a little frustrated about having to explain things to him he felt he shouldn’t have had to. The implication was he’d already had this conversation with some of the other contributors. Sometimes though, the newbie is going to write the clearest documentation.

hinkley 2y ago

I loved concurrent code when I was starting out. I’d taken a pretty good distributed computing class which started the ball rolling. They just fit into how my brain worked very well. Then I had to explain my code to other devs, either before or after they broke it, and over and over I got the message that I was being too clever. I’ve been writing Grug-brained concurrent code for so long I’m not sure I can still do the fancy shit anymore, but I’m okay with that. In fact I know I implemented multiple reader single writer at least a few times and that came back to me during this thread but I still can’t remember how I implemented it.

tombert 2y ago
That's something I'm afraid of for my latest project. I did some concurrent stuff that wasn't 100% clear would actually work, and I had to write a PlusCal spec to exhaustively prove to myself that what I was doing is actually OK. It works pretty well, and I'm getting decent speeds, but I'm really scared someone is going to come and "fix" all my code by doing it the "normal" way, and thus slow everything down. I've been trying to comment the hell out of everything, and I've shared the PlusCal spec, but no one else on my team knows PlusCal and I feel like most engineers don't actually read comments, so I think it's an inevitability that my baby is killed.