Concurrency and Multithreading

Question

I\'m not very experienced with subjects such as Concurrency and Multithreading. In fact, in most of my web-development career I had never needed to touch these subjects.

Answer 1

In languages that are not designed for concurrency, you must rely upon low-level system calls and manage a lot of things yourself. In contrast, a programming language designed for concurrency, like Erlang, will provide high-level constructs that hide the low-level details. This makes it easier to reason about the correctness of your code, and also results in more portable code.

Also, in a programming language designed for concurrency, there are typically only a handful of ways to do concurrent things, which leads to consistency. In contrast, if the programming language was not designed for concurrency, then different libraries and different programmers will do things in different ways, making it difficult to make choices about how to do them.

It's a bit like the difference between a programming language with automated garbage collection and one without. Without the automation, the programmer has to think a lot about implementation details.

The difference between multithreaded programming and multi-process programming (i.e., fork()), is that a multithreaded program may be more efficient because data doesn't have to be passed across process boundaries, but a multi-process approach may be more robust.