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Hi,
I apologize in advance for posting "philosophy" on this site. Having said that
...
I recently came across a paper in the April 1999 issue of the ACM SIGPLAN
Notices. In it, after claiming priority of invention in connection with monitors,
Per Brinch Hansen says the following: "The claim that Java supports monitors is
shown to be false". As a result, he says, "parallel threads can access shared
variables, either directly or indirectly, without any synchronization". Somewhat
(?!?) provocatively, he finishes up with the following: "It is astounding to me that
Java's insecure parallelism is taken seriously by the programming community .... It
has no merit." Pretty strong stuff, eh?
As I am writing an application that centres on Java concurrency, I'm interested
in what experts of various types make of this, especially those involved in building
JVMs.
Roy Wilson
designrw@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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