10 years ago I wrote desktop software with UI threads, background worker threads, network layer threads and various helper threads you spawned on a whim. And so

10 years ago I wrote desktop software with UI threads, background worker threads, network layer threads and various helper threads you spawned on a whim. And so did everybody else. Back then the big innovation to multi-threaded programming was the use of RAII Mutexes[1] to avoid livelock/deadlock scenarios. Fast forward to today. We write complex software for the browser with Javascript front-ends that are completely asynchronous. On the server we have a share-nothing-architecture where hundreds of incoming requests are divided over independent workers. There is still complex multi-threading going on in the database and in the web browser, but most programmers don't have to deal with it anymore. The problem of locks and deadlocks is pretty much a responsibility of the operating system now, much like virtual memory and writing data to the filesystem. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_Acquisition_Is_Initialization http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_Acquisition_Is_Initial...