Summary

So, this was a whirlwind tour of the world of concurrency, dear reader. It served more as a memory refresher for many of the things you probably knew already.

We saw that concurrency is very common in the real world, as well as in the software world. We looked at the message passing and shared memory models, and saw how many common themes drive these two models.

If the shared memory model uses explicit locking, a host of problems emerge. We discussed race conditions, deadlocks, critical sections, and heisenbugs.

We wrapped up with a discussion of asynchronicity, the actor paradigm, and the software transactional memory. Now that we have all this background knowledge, in the next chapter, we will look at some core concurrency patterns. Stay tuned!