Patterns and the democratization of concurrent programming

Abstract

Although precise numbers are lacking, statistics suggest that the number of concurrent programmers has sky-rocketed over the past few years and will continue to do so. This stems mainly from Java's emergence-it's the first ubiquitous concurrent programming language. The rise in concurrent programmers also reflects an increased use of common C++ multithreaded class libraries and frameworks, Posix pthread library standardization, and other wide spectrum concurrent languages. Although only a small proportion of code found in today's production programs, applications, and systems directly exploits concurrency, every programmer should at least be aware of concurrency.