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Linearizability: A correctness condition for concurrent objects


This paper is from Herlihy and Wing appeared in ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems 1990. This is the canonical reference...

I loved Fig 5 as it provides a great illustration of how an observation by the client leads to collapse of multiple possible worlds behind the curtain. Nevertheless, this single-operation restriction has far-reaching practical and formal consequences, giving linearizable computations a different flavor from their serializable counterparts. The idea is that if you use a monotonous sequencer (or true time) as the identifier of requests, you can simplify things back, and manage complexity.

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