Non-Determinism and Event Driven Programming

Problem: How else can the event driven programming model be used?

• Threads can interact with each other in an event driven way
  • wait/notify
• Natural model for many applications
  • Simulations
  • Banking interactions
  • Online auctions
  • Database transactions
• Threads can be used to simplify the design of the program
• For most of these applications, speedup is not the goal, but lower average response time might be

Problem: When is non-determinism a good thing?

• Concurrent programming often creates non-determinism
• Scheduling is not deterministic, even for the same program
• Not a problem for many real world problems mentioned in the last lecture
• Even when there are many correct “answers”, it is important to preserve certain properties
  • Some race conditions are legal, others are not