I’m way-above-average interested in concurrent programming but this 600+ page brick will probably remain on my reading list until I am stranded on a deserted island. Did anyone here read the whole thing? Can one make a reasonable summary or is this more of a lexicon of different techniques?
> concurrent programming If you're interested in concurrent programming this book won't give you much. The topics focus on the parallelization of a sequential algorithm and go into detail about things like synchronization (locking, barriers), important HW details (like caches and CPU pipelining) and algorithmic approaches. Imagine a weather simulation and not concurrent requests to a web server.
My assessment is that the latter is nowhere near “solved” (hesitant to use that word because craft unlike eg proofs is about trade offs), in the sense that concurrency differs a lot across our tools (languages, runtimes etc) and it even differs quite substantially within the main paradigms, like coroutines, async, green threads, native threading etc.
If we compare with other advanced language features like say memory management, we’ve come much further, imo (GC, RAII, ref counting, manual are pretty much all well understood as well as the stack-heap duality, adopted basically universally). With concurrency we have, if we’re being generous, merely mutices as the common ground. Even “simple” notification mechanisms and ownership transfer across tasks would vary greatly across languages and often be quite contrived.