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"concurrency is still widely regarded as 'too hard'." Is it? There isn't going to be an official declaration from the Masters of Computer Science that "2019 wa
by jerf 5y ago
"concurrency is still widely regarded as 'too hard'."
Is it? There isn't going to be an official declaration from the Masters of Computer Science that "2019 was the year concurrency ceased being Too Hard." or anything.
My perception is that it is steadily becoming less and less notable for a program to be "concurrent". Tooling is becoming better. Common practices are becoming better. (In fact, you could arguably take common practices back to the 1990s and even with the tools of the day, tame concurrency. While the tooling had its issues too, I would assert the problem was more the practices than the tooling.) Understanding of how to use it reasonably safely is steadily spreading, and runtimes that make it safer yet are starting to get attention.
I'm not sure I've seen a case where there was a problem that ought to be using concurrency, but nobody involved could figure out any way to deal with it or was too afraid to open that door in a long time. There's still plenty of cases where it doesn't matter even now, of course, because one core is a lot of computing power on its own. But it seems to be that for everyone out there who would benefit from concurrency, they're mostly capable of using it nowadays. Not necessarily without issue, but that's an unfair bar; you can still get yourself in concurrency trouble in Haskell or Erlang, but it's a lot easier than it used to be to get it right.