Days of Sponsored Lunch
Microsoft's .Net Common Language Runtime (CLR) came to the rescue with the managed thread pool (which stabilized around version 2.0), which paved the way for a strong foundation layer on top of which the concurrency and parallelization models subsequently evolved.
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The most notable ones include Asynchronous Programming Model (APM), Concurrency and Coordination Runtime (CCR), Decentralized Software Services (DSS), Parallel LINQ (PLINQ), Task Parallel Library (TPL), and the Task-based Async/Await model.
Certain functional constructs and language features like Anonymous Methods, Lambda Expressions, Extension Methods, Anonymous Types, and Language Integrated Query (LINQ) were the core catalysts that aided this evolution. Major contributors and SMEs include Erik Meijer for LINQ, Joe Duffy and Jon Skeet for Multithreading in .NET), Stephen Toub, Ade Miller, Colin Campbell, and Ralph Johnson for Parallel Extensions, and Jeffrey Richter and George Chrysanthakopoulos for...