Brian Goetz is keynoting at codemash on the topic of concurrency. I’ve intuitively known that concurrency and threading is hard. I come from mostly a PHP world, and butted heads with some Java devs a few years ago because I built something in PHP that they were building in Java. “But PHP doesn’t have threads!” was their rationale (stated) for not using my app. Yet there’s a world-renown expert standing up here outlining how difficult threading is, and outlining all the worms in the can that gets opened by employing threading.
Granted, my ‘solution’ was to push the concurrent issues to transactions in the database, which isn’t really ‘solving’ the issue entirely. I do think that it does simplify things to some extent, but it’s more a gut feeling that anything based on empirical evidence. Perhaps Brian will talk about this solution and whether it’s really any ‘better’ or not.
The Ousterhoust presentation on threading would have been a great thing to know about years ago.
