This lesson clarifies the common misunderstandings and confusions around concurrency and parallelism. Please consider supporting us by signing up for a paid Medium account. Concurrency vs Parallelism Concurrency and Parallelism are often confused to refer to the ability of a system to run multiple distinct programs at the same time. Though the two…

This lesson details the differences between the two prevailing models of multitasking. Please consider supporting us by signing up for a paid Medium account. Cooperative vs Preemptive Multitasking A system can achieve concurrency by employing one of the following multitasking models: Preemptive Multitasking Cooperative Multitasking Get a leg up on your competition with the…

This lesson discusses the differences between asynchronous and synchronous programming, which are often talked about in the context of concurrency. Please consider supporting us by signing up for a paid Medium account. Synchronous vs Asynchronous Synchronous Synchronous execution refers to the line-by-line execution of code. When a function is invoked, the program execution waits…

In this lesson, we delve into the characteristics of programs with different resource-use profiles and how that can affect program design choices. Please consider supporting us by signing up for a paid Medium account. I/O Bound vs CPU Bound We write programs to solve problems. Programs utilize various resources of the computer systems on which…

This lesson discusses throughput and latency in the context of concurrent systems. Please consider supporting us by signing up for a paid Medium account. Throughput vs Latency Throughput Throughput is defined as the rate of doing work or how much work gets done per unit of time. If you are an Instagram user, you…

This lesson discusses the differences between a program, a process, and a thread. Also included is a pseudocode-example of a thread-unsafe program. Please consider supporting us by signing up for a paid Medium account. Program vs Process vs Thread Program A program is a set of instructions and associated data that resides on the disk and…

This lesson introduces concurrency and provides motivational examples to further our understanding of concurrent systems. Please consider supporting us by signing up for a paid Medium account. Introduction Understanding of concurrency and its implementation models using either threads or coroutines exhibits maturity and technical depth in a candidate, which can be…

This lesson exhibits how incorrect synchronization in a critical section can lead to race conditions and buggy code. The concepts of the critical section and race condition are explained in depth. Also included is an executable example of a race condition. Please consider supporting us by signing up for a…

We discuss important concurrency concepts such as deadlock, liveness, live-lock, starvation, and reentrant locks in depth. Also included are executable code examples for illustrating these concepts. Please consider supporting us by signing up for a paid Medium account. Deadlock and Liveness Logical follies committed in multithreaded code, while trying to avoid race conditions…