Concurrent Programming on Windows

Preface

I BEGAN WRITING this book toward the end of 2005. At the time, dual-core processors were becoming standard on the mainstream PCs that ordinary (nonprogrammer) consumers were buying, and a small number of people in industry had begun to make noise about the impending concurrency problem. (Herb Sutter’s, The Free Lunch is Over, paper immediately comes to mind.) The problem people were worried about, of course, was that the software of the past was not written in a way that would allow it to naturally exploit that additional compute power. Contrast that with the never-ending increase in clock speeds. No more free lunch, indeed.

It seemed to me that concurrency was going to eventually be an important part of every software developer’s job ...