The Problem with Threads (2006) [pdf]

This piece seems to have predicted a very active field in everyday software development since then.<p>What are the alternative paradigms that have actually become common use? Coroutines, async&#x2F;await, that&#x27;s what I hear about online but what are others? I&#x27;ve seen people who touted zmq-communicating-processes with standard patterns as the solution to all problems, and I&#x27;m happy not to have to maintain the results.<p>Have we effectively “solved” the concurrency problem, and if so what&#x27;s left as an exercise for the future?

I&#x27;ve always liked section 3 of this paper, specifically the concept that &quot;infinite interleavings&quot; make threads executing in parallel non-deterministic and difficult to reason about. That gets to the heart of why threaded programs are so prone to heisenbugs.<p><i>&quot;They make programs absurdly nondeterministic, and rely on programming style to constrain that nondeterminism to achieve deterministic aims.&quot;</i><p>You can&#x27;t write an infinite number of test cases for all those interleavings, and it requires hard thought to suss out where any problems might lie.