Comment by gf000
6 months ago
Does preventing data races (which is not particularly hard if you are willing to give up certain properties, e.g. just immutability alone solves it) that much of a win?
You just made a bunch of concurrent algorithms un-implementable that would give much better performance for the benefit of.. having all the other unsolvable issues with concurrency? Like, all the same issues are trivially reproducible at a higher level, with loops within actors' communication that only appear under certain, very dynamic conditions, or a bunch of message passing ending up in an inconsistent state, just not on an "object" level, but on a "group of object" level.
> much of a win?
It's a huge win. Absolutely game changing.
> You just made a bunch of concurrent algorithms un-implementable
Exactly! That's a good thing! You think you need those buggy algorithms, you just don't, at least in 99% of cases.
Yes, you can still end up with inconsistencies when you perform actions without the necessary checks, but those cases that remain are extremely easy to find and fix (and even make completely impossible by design), when compared to the horrors of mutable state with locks.