The Concurrency Problem
What's broken, what almost worked, and what a real fix might look like
- 1 Message Passing Is Shared Mutable State published
- 2 The Isolation Trap
- 3 What Async Promised and What It Delivered
- 4 Dataflow, FRP, and STM
- 5 Rust and Ownership
- 6 A Unifying Theory
- 7 What Should Concurrency Look Like?
Latest
February 20, 2026
Message Passing Is Shared Mutable State
What Go, Java, and Erlang reveal about the state of concurrency
The failure of message passing to eliminate concurrency bugs wasn't surprising, it was predicted. Edward Lee argued in 2006 that the shared-memory vs. message-passing debate was a false dichotomy. Go was a billion-dollar natural experiment. The results confirmed the prediction.