Articles
Real-World Concurrency
In this look at how concurrency affects practitioners in the real world, Cantrill and Bonwick argue that much of the anxiety over concurrency is unwarranted.
Erlang for Concurrent Programming
What role can programming languages play in dealing with concurrency? One answer can be found in Erlang, a language designed for concurrency from the ground up.
Parallel Programming with Transactional Memory
While sometimes even writing regular, single-threaded programs can be quite challenging, trying to split a program into multiple pieces that can be executed in parallel adds a whole dimension of additional problems. Drawing upon the transaction concept familiar to most programmers, transactional memory was designed to solve some of these problems and make parallel programming easier. Ulrich Drepper from Red Hat shows us how it's done.
Software Transactional Memory: Why Is It Only a Research Toy?
STM is sometimes touted as the way forward for developing concurrent software, but is it ready for use in real-world applications? The authors built an STM runtime system and compiler framework, the IBM STM, and compared its performance to other similar products by Intel and Sun. They conclude that from both performance and productivity standpoints, STM still has a long way to go before it can be viable in the real world.
Interviews
A Conversation with Steve Bourne, Eric Allman, and Bryan Cantrill
In part two of their discussion, our editorial board members consider XP and Agile.
Kode Vicious
Beautiful Code Exists, if You Know Where to Look
Dear KV, I've been reading your rants in Queue for a while now and I can't help asking, is there any code you do like? You always seem so negative; I really wonder if you actually believe the world of programming is such an ugly place or if there is, somewhere, some happy place that you go to but never tell your readers about.
