Clojure: High Performance JVM Programming

Concurrency with threads

On the JVM, threads are the de-facto fundamental instrument of concurrency. Multiple threads live in the same JVM; they share the heap space, and compete for the resources.

JVM support for threads

The JVM threads are the Operating System threads. Java wraps an underlying OS thread as an instance of the java.lang.Thread class, and builds up an API around it to work with threads. A thread on the JVM has a number of states: New, Runnable, Blocked, Waiting, Timed_Waiting, and Terminated. A thread is instantiated by overriding the run() method of the Thread class, or by passing an instance of the java.lang.Runnable interface to the constructor of the Thread class.

Invoking the start() method of a Thread instance starts its execution ...