Portland Java User Group 2013-12-17 - JMM by Jeff Berkowitz - 640x480.mp4

Throughout its 18-year evolution, the Java language has played an industry-leading role in the tricky business of specifying the behavior of concurrent programs. Java's contribution became particularly evident with the introduction of the Java Memory Model (JMM) in Java 1.5.

This is an area in which a down-to-the-metal understanding can help developers strike the right balance between safety and performance, so we'll start by motivating the discussion with counterintuitive low-level examples. Then we'll work "up from the weeds" to describe the JMM as a basis for more familiar programming patterns. We'll touch on how C, C++, and C# deal with the same issues and give a nod to functional languages and Java 8.

This video can help developers become more insightful about how compiler optimizations can lead to hardware races, reorderings, and other concurrency issues in their code.