learning concurrency

I’ve heard these terms a lot, concurrency and multithreading, but I never really bothered looking into what they actually do. All I’ve really known about these terms was that they make things run faster. I mostly associated multithreading with hyperthreading, I’ve known that CPUs can use multiple cores for the same application to speed up runtime and make games perform better, but I was always sort of confused about how some games have issues with actually taking advantage of modern high-end CPUs. Usually, this is fixed by some sort of modification, if it’s been written already. That being said, my association between the two is only really surface level.

Hyperthreading is really just related to the physical hardware, which makes it different from multithreading in programming. Instead, multithreading is a form of concurrency in which a program has multiple threads that can run simultaneously, with each thread having its own operations and processes that it executes. What this ultimately means is that within a program, multiple operations can be executed at the same time.

This really fascinates me coming from the perspective of only writing straightforward code. While I sort of knew intuitively that programs can probably do multiple tasks at the same time, I’ve only experienced this on the end-user side of things, rather than the individual writing the program. After looking into how threads work in Java on a BairesDev post regarding Java concurrency, I can really see how powerful of a tool concurrency can be for runtime efficiency. This post essentially goes over what concurrency is and the ‘basics’ of utilizing built-in multithreading functions in Java, along with the advantages and disadvantages that this design comes with.

Of course, it does seem like it takes a careful approach to make sure that the implementation of such a tool is actually beneficial to the project. Even with this relatively simple tutorial, I did find myself a little confused at some points, particularly at the point where Locks are introduced. Though this could be the effect of the hour at which I decided to start writing this blog post, it still stands to reason that the complexity of writing a multithreaded program may result in a more difficult development process, especially in debugging.

Regardless, I was truly fascinated by the subject matter and I’m really excited to be going over concurrency in our course (CS-343). This seems like a tool I would really like to use as I enjoy toying with logistics in video games and the like.