Stalking the Lost Write: Memory Visibility in Concurrent Java

Throughout its 18-year evolution, the Java language has played an industry-leading role in the tricky business of specifying the behavior of concurrent programs. Java's contribution became particularly evident with the introduction of the Java Memory Model (JMM) in Java 1.5.

This is an area in which a down-to-the-metal understanding can help developers strike the right balance between safety and performance, so we'll start by motivating the discussion with counterintuitive low-level examples. Then we'll work "up from the weeds" to describe the JMM as a basis for more familiar programming patterns. We'll touch on how C, C++, and C# deal with the same issues and give a nod to functional languages and Java 8.

This material can help most developers become more insightful about concurrency issues in their code. Be there or be unsynchronized!

Speaker

Jeff Berkowitz is a Java software developer at New Relic's Intergalactic Engineering Headquarters in Portland, Oregon. Prior to joining New Relic, Jeff worked at Oracle and a host of other companies. Jeff wrote multithreaded kernel code for Sequent in the 1980s and began learning Java when it was still in beta. Jeff is married and has lived in the Portland area for more than 25 years. In his spare time he likes to read and write about nerdy things, consume hopped products, hover over a smokey barbecue, or watch football with friends.