A Comparison of Relativistic and Reader-Writer Locking Approaches to Shared Data Access

This paper explores the relationship between reader-writer locking and relativistic programming approaches to managing accesses to shared data. It demonstrates that by placing certain restrictions on writers, relativistic programming allows more concurrency than reader-writer locking while still providing the same isolation guarantees. Relativistic programming also allows for a straightforward model for reasoning about the correctness of programs that allow concurrent read-write accesses.