Concurrency and Multithreading Basics for Novice Programmers

• Understand common myths about multi-threading and concurrency in programming

• Learn how to avoid common misconceptions that can lead to errors and instability

• Focus on the fundamentals and tools needed to write effective multi-threaded code

• Discover the finer nuances of concurrency beyond simple simultaneous execution

• Understanding these external factors is crucial in decision-making for concurrent programming in C++.

• Concurrency programming is a social engineering challenge that requires clarifying assumptions before proposing solutions.

• Justify concurrency based on the separation of concerns and performance, and avoid using it as a fashion statement.

• The course will provide evidence to support these two primary reasons for using concurrency.

• Multithreading allows a program to execute multiple instructions at the same time.

• Multiple threads work with the exact instructions and execute them at different stages.

• Multithreading allows different segments of a program to be executed by multiple threads.

• Multithreading becomes concurrency when multiple threads interact with each other and parallelism when threads work independently.

• Multitasking is performing multiple tasks or processes over a period of time by executing them concurrently.

• Multitasking does not imply multithreading.

• Multitasking on a single processor system is implemented by time slicing, which switches the CPU between different tasks.

• Data parallelism breaks down a large dataset into smaller chunks and runs the same function on all of them.

• Task parallelism is multiple independent tasks or programs operating on their own individual data and sharing state among them if needed.

1. What is a process, and how is it implemented in different operating systems?

2. What is the relationship between a thread and a process, and how do threads share resources?

3. What is a call stack, and how is it used in relation to threads?

4. What is the difference between stack and heap memory, and what factors determine what should be stored in each?

5. How is heap memory managed, and is it shared across threads in a process?

1. What is the concept of "core count" and how does it relate to the number of cores in a processor?

2. How does the number of cores and threads in a processor affect program execution?

3. What is hyperthreading and how does it impact processor performance?

4. How does the number of hardware threads in a processor relate to the number of software threads that can be run simultaneously?

This lecture is about the concept of concurrency and how it relates to shared resources that can be accessed by multiple threads. The goal is to avoid race conditions where a resource is modified by one thread while another thread is reading it, leading to inconsistent information. The lecture explains that different programming languages have their own ways of dealing with race conditions, but it's best to avoid them altogether. The lecture briefly mentions other concepts related to concurrency such as fibers and green threads, but clarifies that they will not be covered in this course.

Explains how C++ standard gets shipped to the programmer to allow implementing features like concurrency and multithreading.

Concurrency from a hardware perspective.

A simple overview of the concept of context switching used by the operating systems.

In this lecture, we will explore the impact of production environments on concurrent programming in C++. As we progress from simpler devices to more complex ones like servers, gaming consoles, or IoT devices, we encounter different hardware, operating systems, and loads that can significantly impact concurrency design. To tackle this challenge, we must understand the role of monitoring and how it can help detect problems, and the best practices in SRE and DevOps. We'll learn how to upscale our team to avoid fundamental mistakes and how to migrate from old code to new syntax while maintaining performance consistency.

Amdhal's law simplified explanation with practical examples.