Concurrency

Threading is just one of the many ways concurrent programs can be built. In this article, we will take a look at threading and a couple of other strategies for building concurrent programs in Python, as well as discuss how each is suitable in different scenarios.

Concurrency allows programs to deal with a lot of tasks at once. But writing concurrent programs isn’t a particularly easy feat. Dealing with constructs such as threads and locks and avoiding issues like race conditions and deadlocks can be quite cumbersome, making concurrent programs difficult to write.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Marko Dvečko gives us an overview of some concurrent programming models. He explains how each of these models gives structure to the programs we write and shows how to avoid certain concurrency issues that can come with these models.

The newest version of the Java platform, Java 8, was released more than a year ago. Many companies and developers are still starting new applications with old versions of Java. There are very few good reasons to do this, because Java 8 has brought some important improvements to the language. I’ll show you a handful of the most useful and interesting ones.

A thorough and practical introduction to concurrent and parallel programming in Ruby, presenting and contrasting a number of techniques and options available, from the standpoints of both performance and complexity. Discusses forking, multithreading, the Global Interpreter Lock (GIL), and more.

Go is a relatively new language with a number of attractive features. It’s great for writing concurrent programs, thanks to an excellent set of low-level features for handling concurrency. In many cases, though, a handful of reusable abstractions over those low-level mechanisms makes life much easier. This introductory tutorial walks you through building one such abstraction: a wrapper that can turn any data structure into a transactional service in Go.

Writing concurrent programs is hard. Having to deal with threads, locks, race conditions, and so on is highly error-prone and can lead to code that is difficult to read, test, and maintain. This post provides an introductory guide to the Scala-based Akka framework, showing (with code samples) how Akka facilitates and simplifies the implementation of robust, concurrent, fault-tolerant applications.