Re: Proposal for fixing race conditions

Hi everyone,

As you may have seen, we discussed the issue of race conditions during our group teleconference last week. It is my understanding that similar opinions were voiced on the call as have been written here on the list, but given that only a subset of participants attended the call, I would encourage you to go read the detailed minutes.

http://www.w3.org/2013/07/11-audio-minutes.html

The breadth and incompatibility of opinions makes it hard so far to identify consensus.


If I may try and paraphrase the points made by the participants of the teleconference, we had:

* Race conditions could happen but they are unlikely, so we don't need to act on the issue
* Changing the API with a memcopy solution would have unacceptable performance impact (moot if solution does not involve memcopy)
* Changing the API would make it more complicated than needed
* Changing the API would be a choice between serious performance impact or unnecessary breaking changes
* It would be good to make clear that after the effect changes to ArrayBuffer have no defined effect, but we don't need to explicity prevent the race conditions
* Fixing the race condition issue is good but the solution involving neutering ArrayBuffers has unacceptable performance impact
* The possibility of race conditions goes against the goal to have one code with same effect across platforms, devices and implementations


It seems that we have basically three ways forward:

1. No consensus - status quo

2. Consensus that the spec needs to be clear about the possibility of race conditions, but no agreement around mitigating change to the API

3. Consensus around one particular solution. There were at least two I can recall:
  - The original, proposed by ROC http://www.w3.org/mid/CAOp6jLZ9e4crmJBxv9gZWQDWjUyO9HCjRVMzhFfDLoJDdFLj1g@mail.gmail.com
  - An alternative, proposed by Jer http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-audio/2013AprJun/0678.html


Given the state of the discussion at the moment, it is not trivial to determine which of the three ways is more likely to result in consensus. During our call last week, I suggested that we should ask the group over at public-script-coord (and/or the TAG) for input. It would be fair to say that there wasn't overwhelming support for the idea, but given the relative deadlock in our current discussion, I still think it would be helpful. Any objection to (or, indeed, support for) the idea?


Thanks,
Olivier


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Received on Tuesday, 16 July 2013 15:15:17 UTC