Seven Concurrency Models in Seven Weeks

Chapter 1Introduction

Concurrent programming is nothing new, but it’s recently become a hot topic. Languages like Erlang, Haskell, Go, Scala, and Clojure are gaining mindshare, in part thanks to their excellent support for concurrency.

The primary driver behind this resurgence of interest is what’s become known as the “multicore crisis.” Moore’s law continues to deliver more transistors per chip,^[3] but instead of those transistors being used to make a single CPU faster, we’re seeing computers with more and more cores.

As Herb Sutter said, “The free lunch is over.”^[4] You can no longer make your code run faster by simply waiting for faster hardware. These days if you need more performance, you need to exploit multiple cores, ...