Yes, these are alternatives to (and/or implemented on top of) shared-memory parallelism, and mostly much better to work with. To continue the cryptography analo

Yes, these are alternatives to (and/or implemented on top of) shared-memory parallelism, and mostly much better to work with. To continue the cryptography analogy, it's using experts' cryptography libraries. Sometimes you do need to juggle the razor blades yourself (it's not actually turtles all the way down) but it shouldn't be done lightly.