Distributed asynchronous systems often require explicit synchronization to ensure the correct implementation of shared objects. In this talk, I introduce the Delaying the Future approach for reasoning about the ordering of events in distributed executions. Its key idea is that, under certain conditions, events can be postponed without any process noticing the change.
I will show how this technique leads to characterizations of communication requirements in asynchronous message-passing systems and in shared-memory systems under the TSO memory model. The Delaying the Future approach provides a unified way to understand the synchronization required by linearizable implementations of common objects such as registers, stacks, and snapshots.