SharedStateConcurrency

Shared State Concurrency is concurrency among two or more processes (here, a process is a flow of control; rather than a particular type of kernel object) which have some shared state between them; which both processes can read to and write from. See also MessagePassingConcurrency.

SharedStateConcurrency has the following advantages...

• Can be very fast.
• Makes GlobalConsensus much easier to achieve
• Makes passing around ReferenceObjects that much easier, especially if a pointer/reference valid in one process is valid in another.
• Can be used to model MessagePassingConcurrency fairly easily.

...and disadvantages

• Much more difficult to model and prove a system correct.
• Requires lots of synchronization primitives (SynchronizationStrategies) to prevent race-conditions
• Does not scale well to distributed systems, especially in the presence of unreliable connections between processes (i.e. over a network).

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Criticisms of the "advantages" above:

• It's not particularly useful for a system to be fast but incorrect, and in any case the speed advantage relative to message passing is small.
• The point about GlobalConsensus is refuted at MessagePassingConcurrency. In a nutshell, this depends on the actual reliability of communications, not the concurrency model.
• Passing ReferenceObjects is also easy in most message-passing models.
• If you use MessagePassingConcurrency implemented in terms of shared state, then depending on how well the shared state is hidden:
  • its disadvantages leak into the message passing layer, or
  • its disadvantages don't leak, in which case it is an ImplementationDetail and you should describe the system as using message passing.

See also ConceptsTechniquesAndModelsOfComputerProgramming.

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CategoryConcurrency