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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-17T19:15:19+00:00

There is at least three well-known approaches for creating concurrent applications: Multithreading and memory

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There is at least three well-known approaches for creating concurrent applications:

  1. Multithreading and memory synchronization through locking(.NET, Java). Software Transactional Memory (link text) is another approach to synchronization.

  2. Asynchronous message passing (Erlang).

I would like to learn if there are other approaches and discuss various pros and cons of these approaches applied to large distributed applications. My main focus is on simplifying life of the programmer.

For example, in my opinion, using multiple threads is easy when there is no dependencies between them, which is pretty rare. In all other cases thread synchronization code becomes quite cumbersome and hard to debug and reason about.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I’d strongly recommend looking at this presentation by Rich Hickey. It describes an approach to building high performance, concurrent applications which I would argue is distinct from lock-based or message-passing designs.

    Basically it emphasises:

    • Lock free, multi-threaded concurrent applications
    • Immutable persistent data structures
    • Changes in state handled by Software Transactional Memory

    And talks about how these principles influenced the design of the Clojure language.

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