JAVA’S INSECURE PARALLELISM PER BRINCH HANSEN

are insecure variants of his earliest ideas in parallel programming published in 1972–73. The claim that Java supports monitors is shown to be false. The author concludes that Java ignores the last twenty-five years of research in parallel programming languages. We must expect posterity to view with some asperity the marvels and the wonders we’re passing on to it; but it should change its attitude to one of heartfelt gratitude when thinking of the blunders we didn’t quite commit. Piet Hein (1966) 1 PLATFORM-INDEPENDENT PARALLEL PROGRAMMING Java has resurrected the well-known idea of platform-independent parallel programming. In this paper I examine the synchronization features of Java to discover their origin and determine if they live up to the standards set by the invention of monitors and Concurrent Pascal a quarter of a century ago. In the 1970s my students and I demonstrated that it is possible to write nontrivial parallel programs exclusively in a secure language that supports monitors. The milestones of this work were