You have seen two of the most common approaches to the problem of deadlock. Each addresses one of the four Coffman conditions, and, while both (somewhat) successfully prevent deadlocks from occurring in our examples, each raises different, additional problems and concerns. It is therefore important to truly understand the nature of your concurrent programs, in order to know which of the two is applicable, if either of them are.

It is also possible that some programs, through deadlock, are revealed to us as unsuitable to be made concurrent; some programs are better left sequential, and will be made worse with forced concurrency. As we have discussed, while concurrency provides significant improvements in many areas of our applications, some are inherently inappropriate for the application of concurrent programming. In situations of deadlock, developers should be ready to consider different approaches to designing a concurrent program, and should not be reluctant to implement another method when one concurrent approach does not work.