Seuss: what the doctor ordered

Reconciling the conflicting goals of simplicity and efficiency has traditionally been a major challenge in the development of concurrent programs. Seuss (see J. Misra, ftp://ftp.cs.utexas.edu/pub/psp/seuss/discipline.ps.Z) is a methodology for concurrent programming that attempts to achieve the right balance between these competing concerns. The goal of Seuss is to permit a disentanglement of the issues of correctness and efficiency. On the one hand, programmers can reason about Seuss programs by assuming a single thread of control; on the other hand, implementation designers can exploit design knowledge in achieving better performance. This paper provides a short overview of the Seuss programming model and describes the main challenges in designing an efficient implementation of Seuss and in applying Seuss to large applications.