Shared Memory
I've been thinking about concurrency.
I think the model of "message-passing with no destructive update" may be the ultimate solution. This is the Erlang approach, and it has a lot going for it.
When you disallow updating data, you can do one incredible, massive optimization: whenever process A sends a huge chunk of data to process B (on the same machine), you just send a pointer. You don't copy the data. You don't marshal it, you don't do nothing. You just give process B a copy of the pointer that A is using. Now, A may later "update" that data by constructing a very similar data structure and throwing away its old pointer. At that point, B is "out of date." If B needs to stay in sync, you should send the new data as well. Since this is cheap, there's no reason not to.
Whenever I've done concurrent programming, I've started out with a shared-memory model and ultimately found that it's too hard to manage the timing and notification issues. I've always abandoned it for message-passing sooner or later.
Do you have an application that absolutely requires mutable shared memory? Either for performance reasons, or just to achieve a solution to the problem?
I want to hear about it.