Question

I have recently pondered on the general approach to multi-threaded code that would be most efficient. As with concurrent collections atomic mechanisms such as Compare-And-Swap are used to provide efficient implementation of collections such as queues. I was wondering whether there are any new approaches to writing multi-threaded code, for instance in java, rather than using pure Thread instances? Are thread pools used more often perhaps?

Answer 1

There are few new approaches emerging:

• message passing and actor-model, see akka (well, the idea comes from erlang…)

• gpu – massive multithreading with thousands of simple micro-threads

• transactional memory (see: clojure)