The Silently Shifting Semicolon

Inaugural Summit on Advances in Programming Languages (SNAPL 2015), Asilomar, CA, May 3-6, 2015.

Daniel Marino, Todd Millstein, Madanlal Musuvathi, Satish Narayanasamy, Abhayendra Singh

Memory consistency models for modern concurrent languages have largely been designed from a system-centric point of view that protects, at all costs, optimizations that were originally designed for sequential programs. The result is a situation that, when viewed from a programmer's standpoint, borders on absurd. We illustrate this unfortunate situation with a brief fable and then examine the opportunities to right our path.

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