Presentation: Concurrency: Past and Present

by Ryan Slobojan on Sep 22, 2008 | NOTICE: The next QCon is in New York Jun 10-14, Join us!

In this presentation from QCon London 2008, Brian Goetz discusses the difficulties of creating multithreaded programs correctly, incorrect synchronization, race conditions, deadlock, Software Transactional Memory, the history of concurrency, alternatives to threads, Erlang, Scala, and recommendations for concurrency in Java.

Watch Concurrency: Past and Present (60 minutes).

Peter Pilgrim, who attended this talk, said:

Brian Goetz does NOT expect people to dump Java and move to JKOCaml, Erlang or other model any time soon.
He promotes "Immutable object where you can". Surprise, surprise. Sometimes it cheaper to make a copy than it is to share. Copying an immutable object is always thread safe.

He recommends to take a look at Scala, in particular the Scala Actors library.

Leonid Maslov also added:

The idea behind [Software Transactional Memory] is the following: let the smart-smart-smart and one more again smart JVM handle these difficult problems, let's delegate this to smart folks behind JVM impls. Hmmm. Sounds like a good stuff (at least for me). The problem is: we won't get it soon, soon enough. Research is still done in this area. Possible (mention-worth) solutions: (I really recommend You to watch that f* great presentation)

Functional languages like Haskell, Erlang, Scala (Actors? library), JOCaml and so on

Not shared state.

Message passing only. Callback mechanisms.

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Community comments

Slow down. by Ashwanth Fernando Posted

Re: Slow down. by Paulo Trecenti Posted

transcripts please! by test freak Posted

Great ! by Dylan Stamat Posted

Great by 许晓斌 Posted

Cool by Surendran Roundry Posted

Worth it by Umberto Zappia Posted

Message Based Concurrency in Java by Mike Rettig Posted

Leonardinius Daugavpils by Leonid Maslov Posted

Re: Leonardinius Daugavpils by Leonid Maslov Posted

Re: Leonardinius Daugavpils by Stefan Tilkov Posted

Re: Leonardinius Daugavpils by Ryan Slobojan Posted

Re: Leonardinius Daugavpils by Leonid Maslov Posted

Slow down. by Ashwanth Fernando

Brian, please ignore the below statement if you have physical problems with speech, but if you slow down a bit without the "unnnnn unnnnn unnnn ummmmm ummmms", it will be so much better. Your book concurrency in action is phenomenal and a gem in the piles of crap these days. Goes without saying that you are definitely "Doug Lea" material, but it would be great if you could slow down a bit to let us understand a bit from you.

However, nothing is gonna stop me from reading your books ;-).

Re: Slow down. by Paulo Trecenti

Hi, did you see something about Ada in Adacore.com? Ada is not much better than all these other languages?

transcripts please! by test freak

Hi,
would it be possible to provide transcripts?

Great ! by Dylan Stamat

Fantastic presentation, and I thought the deliveries pace was perfect. Thank you Brian !

Great by 许晓斌

Really wonderful presentation, thanks

Cool by Surendran Roundry

A cool,informative and a wonderfull presentation,Thank you Brian Goetz.
I did enjoy the introduction :-)

Worth it by Umberto Zappia

A top notch presentation.

Message Based Concurrency in Java by Mike Rettig

Message based concurrency is also available as a library for plain old Java.

Jetlang Messaging Library

Mike Rettig

Jetlang Developer

Leonardinius Daugavpils by Leonid Maslov

I'm _Leonardinius Daugavpils_ mentioned above. Only, leonardinius is my display name (nickname), and Daugavpils - is the place I come from :D
This would wonderful if someone would change this to Leonid Maslov. Thanx in advance.
// If you are not confident about it - try to contact blog owner - leonidms@gmail.com for clarification.

Re: Leonardinius Daugavpils by Leonid Maslov

leonardinius.blogspot.com/2008/09/infoq-called-...

Re: Leonardinius Daugavpils by Stefan Tilkov

Hi Leonid, thanks for letting us know - I've fixed it.

Re: Leonardinius Daugavpils by Ryan Slobojan

Hi Leonid,

My apologies for the mix-up on that - when I looked at your blog, in the upper right corner I saw:

leonardinius Daugavpils/Riga, Latvia

which I interpreted as being your name, with Riga as your hometown.

Thanks for fixing that Stefan!

Re: Leonardinius Daugavpils by Leonid Maslov

Hi Ryan and Stefan.
Not a big deal, I really understand the cause of this. Probably I would get it wrong too (it's just this widget, which displays profile info in some weird manner).

Anyway, thanks a lot for finding that article and mentioning it here.
Thanks Ryan and Stefan.