The composability problem of events and threads in distributed systems

Abstract

Event-driven programming has been a relatively hot topic in distributed systems development. Having worked on these systems for years, we now believe that it is not the best choice. Besides the well-known "stack ripping" problem, we argue that it greatly influences the composability of software modules. Preemptive threads are also short of composability because of data-races and locks. Lacking of composability can result in systems with little vitality. Cooperative threading (or coroutine), on the contrary, is almost free of this problem, so we advocate it as the primary concurrency model for most distributed systems. © 2010 IEEE.