In his “Multithreading inside out” webinar, Florin Ganea, R Systems System Architect and passionate programmer, defines multithreading as a beautiful thing which can take you to the sky, as easily as it can bring you down to the ground.
Starting from examples of real life projects contouring the idea of multithreading black magic, Florin deconstructs general myths and rumours such as:
- Applications run faster without synchronization
- Context switch is very expensive on certain hardware; the number of threads must be decreased
- Operations (like ++) on 32-bit types are atomic. They are executed in a single assembler instruction by the CPU
- Unprotected operations on fundamental types are never leading to data inconsistency
- It is ok to have little inconsistency given the big gain in performance
Throughout the presentation he puts best practices and design patterns you may already know in a new perspective, signalling the do’s and dont’s and drawing the most interesting conclusions of multithreaded programming.
The full recording of the live webinar is available here.