Parallel Programming Must Be Deterministic by Default

<p> </p><p>In today’s widely used parallel programming models, subtle programming errors can lead to unintended nondeterministic behavior and hard to catch bugs. In contrast, we argue for a parallel programming model that is </p> <p><em><em>deterministic by default</em></em>: deterministic behavior is <em><em>guaranteed </em></em>unless the programmer explicitly uses nondeterministic constructs. This goal is particularly challenging for modern object-oriented languages with expressive use of reference aliasing and updates to shared mutable state. We propose a broad research agenda in support of this goal, and we describe some of our own work to further that agenda.</p> <p></p>