Beyond threading

We have seen that concurrency is a rather deep and difficult topic and it rightly deserves the Concurrency is hard label. Can we not do any better? Are threads the last word in concurrency?

Well no. There are a couple of other approaches and we will have a brief look at them just to give the reader some broader perspective of what to expect in the future.

User-space scheduling

As we already said, threads are a rather heavy abstraction! The alternative is to use lightweight threads, that is threads which are scheduled in user space to avoid the thread context switch costs. Languages such as Erlang and Go use that approach and can achieve massive concurrency which makes implementations of actor-based share nothing...