My countryman Bartosz Milewski – the author of one of the best C++ introductory books – the C++ In Action posted video with very interesting talk about Ownership Systems against Data Races (video is here).

Interestingly, Bartosz proposes to understand the battle with data races as a discipline-driven programming that helps, mostly C+ programmers, to avoid all this horrible pitfalls. Moreover, Bartosz presents programmers with a well-designed methodology based on types system as a tool that may guard programs against injury from data races problem and with success.

Basically (and not surprisingly) Bartosz recommends think first, act later kind of approach based on detailed analysis of what might be causing data races in your program, on identification of potential sources of data race problems. This approach is a contrary to spending hours searching for data races conditions using debugger.

The data race problem is a complex subject, but – in my opinion – Bartosz explains it in a very accessible step-by-step form. Three words summary of Bartosz’ lecture and the presented methodology is: sharing + mutability + no synchronisation = data race