Is it easy? No, it is not easy. Correction: It's not easy in most programming languages, because most programming languages fail at implementing mutual exclusi

Is it easy? No, it is not easy. Correction: It's not easy in most programming languages, because most programming languages fail at implementing mutual exclusion in a way that is safe. It's basically the same problem as buffer overruns in C, where indices don't get checked (except that in the concurrent case, most languages don't require you to associate a lock with shared data and/or don't verify that you hold the lock before operating on that shared data). Per Brinch Hansen's famous rant gives the gory details [1]. The basic technology had been figured out in the early 1970s. [1] http://brinch-hansen.net/papers/1999b.pdf http://brinch-hansen.net/papers/1999b.pdf