Episode 44: Interview Brian Goetz and David Holmes

This is another episode on concurrency. We talk to two experts in
the field, Brian Goetz and David Holmes about aspects of
concurrency we hadn't really covered before. We start out by
discussing liveness and safety and then continue to talk about
synchronizers (latches, barriers, semaphores) as well as the
importance of agreeing on protocols when developing concurrent
applications. We then talked about thread confinement as a way of
building thread-safe programs, as well as using functional
programming and immutable data. The next set of topics covers
various ways of how compilers can optimize the performance wrt. to
concurrency, talking about techniques such as escape analysis as
well as lock elision and coarsening. We then covered how to test
concurrent programs and the consequences of the Java memory model
on concurrency. We then went on to look at some more advanced
topics, namely, lock-free programming and atomic variables. We also
briefly discussed the idea of transactional memory. Finally, we
looked at how better language support - specifically, a more
declarative style of concurrent programming as e.g. in the Fortress
language - can aid in improving the quality of concurrent programs.