The Art of Concurrency

Chapter 1. Want to Go Faster? Raise Your Hands if You Want to Go Faster!

“[A]nd in this precious phial is the power to think twice as fast, move twice as quickly, do twice as much work in a given time as you could otherwise do.”

—H. G. Wells, “The New Accelerator” (1901)

With this book I want to peel back the veils of mystery, misery, and misunderstanding that surround concurrent programming. I want to pass along to you some of the tricks, secrets, and skills that I’ve learned over my last two decades of concurrent and parallel programming experience.

I will demonstrate these tricks, secrets, and skills—and the art of concurrent programming—by developing and implementing concurrent algorithms from serial code. I will explain the thought processes I went through for each example in order to give you insight into how concurrent code can be developed. I will be using threads as the model of concurrency in a shared-memory environment for all algorithms devised and implemented. Since this isn’t a book on one specific threading library, I’ve used several of the common libraries throughout and included some hints on how implementations might differ, in case your preferred method wasn’t used.

Like any programming skill, there is a level of mechanics involved in being ready and able to attempt concurrent or multithreaded programming. You can learn these things (such as syntax, methods for mutual ...