Pitfalls in teaching development and testing of concurrent programs and how to overcome them
Eitan Farchi · 2008
This lecture captures industrial and academic experience in teaching concurrent programming for several years. While the statement of a concurrent protocol is typically small taking only a few pages to complete, the statement implicitly introduces an exponential or possibly infinite space of possible interleavings. The novice is not aware of this, and as a result sometimes does not understand the lecture. To overcome this pitfall, exploration of the protocol interleaving is practiced from day one. A classical example being how many results does 100 threads executing i++ have?