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0 pointsAnimalMuppet1y ago0 comments

They can be. Or they can be... less easy.

Imagine you have an informally-specified, undocumented, at-least-somewhat-incomplete state machine. Imagine that it interacts with several other similar state machines. Still easy to reason about?

Now add multithreading. Still easy?

Now add locking. Still easy?

Cleanly-done state machines can be the cleanest way to describe a problem, and the simplest way to implement it. But badly-done state machines can be a total mess.

Alas, I think that the last time I waded in such waters, what I left behind was pretty much on the "mess" side of the scale. It worked, it worked mostly solidly, and it did so for more than a decade. But it was still rather messy.

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lelanthran1y ago

> Imagine you have an informally-specified, undocumented, at-least-somewhat-incomplete state machine. Imagine that it interacts with several other similar state machines. Still easy to reason about?

You think that developers that wrote an informally-specified, undocumented, at-least-somewhat-incomplete state-machine would have written that logic as a non-state-machine in a formally-specified, documented and at-least-somewhat-complete codebase?

State-machines are exceptionally easy to reason about because you can at least reverse-engineer a state-diagram from the state-machine code.

Almost-a-state-machine-but-not-quite are exceptionally difficult to reason about because you can not easily reverse-engineer the state-diagram from the state-machine code.

gpderetta1y ago

In fact state machines are great for documentation even if the code is not explicitly written as a state machine!

_huayra_1y ago

Yes, and it's much better than having a dozen or more `bool` values that indicate some event occurred and put it into some "mode" (e.g. "unhealthy", "input exhausted", etc) and you have to infer what the "hidden state machine is" based on all of those bool values.

Want to add another "bool state"? Hello exponential growth...

rramadass1y ago

But that is just true of any problem-solving/programming technique.

In general, state/event machine transition table and decision table techniques of structuring code are easier to comprehend than adhoc and even worse, poorly understood pattern-based techniques are.

pjc501y ago

> Now add multithreading. Still easy?

> Now add locking. Still easy?

Don't do that then.

Or rather, either manipulate the state machine from only a single thread at a time; or explicitly turn the multithreading into more states. If you need to wait for something instead of having "do X" you transition into state "doing X". C#-style async does this in a state machine behind the scenes.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse