Re:Threads Are a Bad Idea for Most Purposes (1995) [pdf]
by pdimitar on Tuesday January 28, 2020 @06:54PM
(#22175542)
> Meh, I mean, shared mutable state, to me, is the ultimate culprit of threading complexity. If you don't have that, very often many of your problems go away.
Yep, exactly.
Everybody can screw up syncing and message passing as well, given enough lack of experience, or schedule pressure, or simply not getting it. But it's much harder to screw up that while conversely, it's extremely easy to screw up multithreaded code with shared state.
Futures and Promises go a long way in making that better. That's not to say that you can always rely on them, but it is far easier to get them right than it is to get threading right with shared mutable state right.
Actors, Channels, Futures, promises, reactive programming, etc. They all have one thing in common. They kill off shared state in favor of message passing.