underselling the sync/suffer problem

I’ve been drinking the Scala coolaid after years of java synchronized and suffer problem. There is one major synchronization problem that I’m surprised you didn’t touch on: fairness. In Chapter 10 you talk about the inadequacy of making the setters and getters synchronized…saying that you need to put a synchronized block and a get then set block. The problem is that synchronized blocks are not guaranteed to be fifo and in fact will generally be lifo. So just making a synchronized block isn’t enough…you have to use a fair lock to both preserve correctness and ensure timeless of response.

Perhaps this would be considered piling-on to java’s problems here but its a problem that has caused many people lots of trouble.