[WillEngler]

I had a completely different reading. I thought the fable portrayed Alice as thoughtful and bright. The punchline is that this talented student was right to leave programming for cooking because the lack of sequential consistency in high-level languages is absurd.

[agumonkey]

I saw that a few times. Brilliant college minds failing at programming because of legacy and ad-hoc features. They preferred maths and physics, not devoid of arbitrary but, probably tinier and more stable over time.

[acqq]

But is the argument for higher consistency based on the existence of "saner" architecture as in x86, and wasn't argument insufficient in the time the article was written (1998) as well as is now, given that ARM predates the article and its popularity significantly increased since?

[tfoil2]

I see the reference to the "1998 ACM Subject Classification", but this paper is part of a May 2015 conference: http://www.cs.ucla.edu/~todd/research/pub.php?id=snapl15

[avandeursen]

Yes, it is from the "Summit oN Advances in Programming Languages (SNAPL)", May 3-6, 2015.

http://snapl.org/2015/

[acqq]

Then ignoring the existence of the weaker memory model of ARM (versus the stronger x86/x64) is even stranger. And even if x86/x64 models are stronger, they still need some fences and using them all the time would be too slow. So I still don't really understand the arguments of the article.

[madanMus]

The article does not ignore architectures like ARM. You do need fences, but not all the time - the compiler can avoid fences in places where there is no danger of violating sequential consistency (e.g. on accesses to provably local objects).

[tonyarkles]

Yeah, that's my understanding too. It's not "math is hard let's go cooking" it "fuck this nonsense". It's not math problems that are the problem here, it's inconsistent execution in the name of performance.