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Confusion | 6 years ago

Examples in the literature? This is not a bloody academic exercise?!

I use the term 'race condition' about once a week to point out something may happen before or after something else, because the things are happening in parallel.

Simple example:

me: I just uploaded the file to our shared dropbox

you, refreshing: I don't see it yet

me: race condition

discuss

order

dekhn|6 years ago

eventual consistency is not a race condition.

Confusion|6 years ago

Of course it is, that's exactly the point. 'Eventual consistency' is the name for situations where a race condition is acceptable and even a feature. It doesn't matter whether it are threads, processes or entirely different computers that are racing. Whether the data is shared via CPU cache, memory, disk or a network. We don't call it "failed eventual consistency" when a data race occurs.

IggleSniggle|6 years ago

I would never call this a race condition, but mostly because it does not cause an unrecoverable / system crashing failure state (you and your coworker have a protocol to resolve the inconsistent state).