Erlang’s Characteristics From Erlang Programming (2009): Erlang concurrency is fast and scalable. Its processes are lightweight in that the Erlang virtual machine does not create an OS thread for every created process. They are created, scheduled, and handled in the VM, independent of underlying operating system. As a result, process creation time is of the … Read more
In a low level language (C, C++ or whatever): I have the choice in between either having a bunch of mutexes (like what pthread gives me or whatever the native system library provides) or a single one for an object. How efficient is it to lock a mutex? I.e. how many assembler instructions are there … Read more
POSIX allows mutexes to be recursive. That means the same thread can lock the same mutex twice and won’t deadlock. Of course it also needs to unlock it twice, otherwise no other thread can obtain the mutex. Not all systems supporting pthreads also support recursive mutexes, but if they want to be POSIX conform, they … Read more
Is there an equivalent command in GDB to that of WinDbg’s !process 0 7? I want to extract all the threads in a dump file along with their backtraces in GDB. info threads doesn’t output the stack traces. So, is there a command that does? 4 Answers 4
Trying to grasp some basics of Redis I came across an interesting blog post . The author states: Redis is single-threaded with epoll/kqueue and scale indefinitely in terms of I/O concurrency. I surely misunderstand the whole threading thing, because I find this statement puzzling. If a program is single-threaded, how does it do anything concurrently? … Read more
What is the difference between a thread and a fiber? I’ve heard of fibers from ruby and I’ve read heard they’re available in other languages, could somebody explain to me in simple terms what is the difference between a thread and a fiber. 9 Answers 9
I believe the Erlang community is not envious of Node.js as it does non-blocking I/O natively and has ways to scale deployments easily to more than one processor (something not even built-in in Node.js). More details at http://journal.dedasys.com/2010/04/29/erlang-vs-node-js and Node.js or Erlang What about Haskell? Can Haskell provide some of the benefits of Node.js, namely … Read more
What are the major differences between a Monitor and a Semaphore? 7 Answers 7
Concurrency is having two tasks run in parallel on separate threads. However, asynchronous methods run in parallel but on the same 1 thread. How is this achieved? Also, what about parallelism? What are the differences between these 3 concepts? 15 Answers 15
Recently, I have been asked a question in an interview what’s the difference between a process and a thread. Really, I did not know the answer. I thought for a minute and gave a very weird answer. Threads share the same memory, processes do not. After answering this, the interviewer gave me an evil smile … Read more
