Systems using these operations are in general not "composable". In other words, it is usually not possible to compose two software systems using semaphores and/or mutexes, without rewriting these systems somehow.
Alternatives exist. For example: message passing, and STM (software transactional memory). Anybody know of other alternatives?
Message passing can be asynchronous, but on some level, the system might have to synchronize certain operations. If you implement a financial system, you'll certainly have to synchronize stuff even if you're using asychronous message passing to implement it -- you will simply implement synchronicity on the top of an asychronous infrastructure.
And when operations start to depend on each other, then you _have_ to think about potential deadlocks, race conditions, etc.
Basically there isn't anything that solves this for you. STM is somewhat different as the danger is not deadlocks but starvation, etc.
There's nothing that "solves" the problem, but there are "things that will summon forth C'thulu" and "things that are merely difficult".
It should be noted that spinlocks, mutexes and conditions (and semaphores) are building blocks that are necessary to implement message passing, software transactional memory and other non-trivial parallel programming constructs. (at least until we have practical hardware transactional memory).
Spinlocks, mutexes and conditions are a "necessary evil", not "considered harmful".
That one was funnier then the orignal pun. Nicely done. :D
goto is harmful when used improperly but fine everywhere else.
fpgeek wasn't actually making a statement about goto
Morealso STM doesn't solve the transactional problem that you face with using locks (mutex). Overall STM is just a fancy thing to have but hardly solves the big problem of transaction boundaries.
Message passing is easier to reason about due to global ordering but then you need some FIFO queues that are built upon some kind of mutex or spin lock... or Lamport based one (using for single producer-> single consumer one)... or some variant of Michael & Scott queue, etc.
In the end underneath you have to do the metal, so they cannot be 'considered harmful'.