This month’s Effective Concurrency column, Associate Mutexes with Data to Prevent Races”, is now live on DDJ’s website.

From the article:

Come together: Associate mutexes with the data they protect, and you can make your code race-free by construction

Race conditions are one of the worst plagues of concurrent code: They can cause disastrous effects all the way up to undefined behavior and random code execution, yet they’re hard to discover reliably during testing, hard to reproduce when they do occur, and the icing on the cake is that we have immature and inadequate race detection and prevention tool support available today.

The holy grail of the Consistency pillar is to make a concurrent program race-free and deadlock-free by construction. … This article shows how to achieve the "race-free by construction" grail via sound engineering, with automatic and deterministic race identification at test time based on code coverage alone.

I hope you enjoy it. Finally, here are links to previous Effective Concurrency columns:

1 The Pillars of Concurrency (Aug 2007)

2 How Much Scalability Do You Have or Need? (Sep 2007)

3 Use Critical Sections (Preferably Locks) to Eliminate Races (Oct 2007)

4 Apply Critical Sections Consistently (Nov 2007)

5 Avoid Calling Unknown Code While Inside a Critical Section (Dec 2007)

6 Use Lock Hierarchies to Avoid Deadlock (Jan 2008)

7 Break Amdahl’s Law! (Feb 2008)

8 Going Superlinear (Mar 2008)

9 Super Linearity and the Bigger Machine (Apr 2008)

10 Interrupt Politely (May 2008)

11 Maximize Locality, Minimize Contention (Jun 2008)

12 Choose Concurrency-Friendly Data Structures (Jul 2008)

13 The Many Faces of Deadlock (Aug 2008)

14 Lock-Free Code: A False Sense of Security (Sep 2008)

15 Writing Lock-Free Code: A Corrected Queue (Oct 2008)

16 Writing a Generalized Concurrent Queue (Nov 2008)

17 Understanding Parallel Performance (Dec 2008)

18 Measuring Parallel Performance: Optimizing a Concurrent Queue (Jan 2009)

19 volatile vs. volatile (Feb 2009)

20 Sharing Is the Root of All Contention (Mar 2009)

21 Use Threads Correctly = Isolation + Asynchronous Messages (Apr 2009)

22 Use Thread Pools Correctly: Keep Tasks Short and Nonblocking (Apr 2009)

23 Eliminate False Sharing (May 2009)

24 Break Up and Interleave Work to Keep Threads Responsive (Jun 2009)

25 The Power of “In Progress” (Jul 2009)

26 Design for Manycore Systems (Aug 2009)

27 Avoid Exposing Concurrency – Hide It Inside Synchronous Methods (Oct 2009)

28 Prefer structured lifetimes – local, nested, bounded, deterministic (Nov 2009)

29 Prefer Futures to Baked-In “Async APIs” (Jan 2010)

30 Associate Mutexes with Data to Prevent Races (May 2010)