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Comment by mrkeen | Hacker News Reader

Fine then. Your compiler is bad at reasoning about multiple threads simultaneously.

So how my compiler reasons about multiple threads?

> Reads and writes do not always happen in the order that you have written them in your code, and this can lead to very confusing problems. In many multi-threaded algorithms, a thread writes some data and then writes to a flag that tells other threads that the data is ready. This is known as a write-release. If the writes are reordered, other threads may see that the flag is set before they can see the written data.

> Reordering of reads and writes can be done both by the compiler and by the processor. Compilers and processors have done this reordering for years, but on single-processor machines it was less of an issue.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/dxtecharts/l...

>"In many multi-threaded algorithms, a thread writes some data and then writes to a flag that tells other threads that the data is ready. This is known as a write-release. If the writes are reordered, other threads may see that the flag is set before they can see the written data."

This is why we have things like WaitForSingleObject and many other that deal properly with the chance of reordering and other concurrency related issues. All is fine with the reasoning on CPU, OS, Compiler and my own level. One just have to understand what is going on and know the tools. Those who are setting boolean flag to indicate the data is ready should not be programming for modern CPU's and have a basic knowledge first.

When the brightest minds in computer science, who've spent literal man-centuries developing the theory behind some of the various multiprocessing frameworks currently used, tell you multithreading is hard, I tend to go with those over J Random Hacker News Poster claiming it's easy-peasy and everyone else is lazy.

Developing good framework (does not have to be multi processing) is generally hard. Having decent subject understanding and knowing how to use said frameworks is not a rocket science. And there is a difference between "easy-peasy (tm)" and not being lazy and learning some basics

I’m sorry but I spent two semesters studying the theory behind concurrent data structures and formalizations of concurrent state machines and there is no way you can tell me that reasoning about multithreaded program state is easy.

In fairness, concurrent data structures generally don’t represent what gp is talking about. Yes, very, very difficult to write a solid concurrent ring buffer. Writing Java’s concurrent hashmap - hard. Using it to implement a simple in memory kv store: not that hard.

But ensuring some parallelism while maintaining thread safety is straightforward in many contexts - an uncontended mutex is close to zero overhead. Languages like Rust make it harder to struggle with some of the thornier issues (data races which cannot be simulated by stepping threads).

E.g. in Java a typical system looks like a thread per request with some shared underlying data structures like caches or connection pools. Relatively easy to use these safely, or to guard some shared object with a synchronized.

Likewise with parallelism - a lot of problems just boil down to ‘do a few map reduces’ and the parallelism is pretty trivial.

Obviously, concurrent systems are fiendish to reason through - but there are a lot of cases where the complexity can be side stepped. Doesn’t seem to stop people writing scary code on the daily though.

I spent lifetime (since the end of the 80s) programming concurrent systems among many other things. Think I can draw my own conclusions.

It shows; something that needs a lifetime to master is definitely not on my list of Easy(TM) things.

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