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Concurrency Models

· One min read

  • Single-threaded - Callbacks, Promises, Observables and async/await: vanilla JS
  • threading/multiprocessing, lock-based concurrency
    • protecting critical section vs. performance
  • Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP)
    • Golang or Clojure’s core.async.
    • process/thread passes data through channels.
  • Actor Model (AM): Elixir, Erlang, Scala
    • asynchronous by nature, and have location transparency that spans runtimes and machines - if you have a reference (Akka) or PID (Erlang) of an actor, you can message it via mailboxes.
    • powerful fault tolerance by organizing actors into a supervision hierarchy, and you can handle failures at its exact level of hierarchy.
  • Software Transactional Memory (STM): Clojure, Haskell
    • like MVCC or pure functions: commit / abort / retry