Loading...
Thread-safe components, lock granularity, and immutable-object strategies.
3 questions in Low-Level Design & OOD.
Thread-safe component design starts by assigning every field a policy: confined, immutable or guarded by a named lock. Method-level synchronization is not enough because atomic methods do not compose into atomic workflows.
A producer-consumer bounded buffer applies backpressure to the producer instead of letting an unbounded queue absorb overload until the process dies. Deciding what a full buffer does - block, drop, or reject - is the decision that determines how the system fails.
A deadlock is a cycle in the wait-for graph, so the design goal is a graph that cannot contain one: stop holding two locks where you can, impose one total order on acquisition everywhere you cannot, and never call unknown code while holding a lock.