In Herlihy and Wing’s seminal paper introducing linearizability, they mention an important advantage of this consistency model:

Unlike alternative correctness conditions such as sequential consistency [31] or serializability [40], linearizability is a local property: a system is linearizable if each individual object is linearizable.

Locality is important because it allows concurrent systems to be designed and constructed in a modular fashion; linearizable objects can be implemented, verified, and executed independently. A concurrent system based on a nonlocal correctness property must either rely on a centralized scheduler for all objects, or else satisfy additional constraints placed on objects to ensure that they follow compatible scheduling protocols.

More from Hacker News. I figure this might be of interest to folks working on parallel systems. I’ll let KirinDave kick us off with:

Go scales quite well across multiple cores iff you decompose the problem in a way that's amenable to Go's strategy. Same with Erlang.

No one is making “excuses”. It’s important to understand these problems. Not understanding concurrency, parallelism, their relationship, and Amdahl’s Law is what has Node.js in such trouble right now.

This is a response to a Hacker News thread asking about concurrency vs parallelism.

Concurrency is more than decomposition, and more subtle than “different pieces running simultaneously.” It’s actually about causality.