Chapter 1. Introduction

In which we discuss the motivation for creating thread libraries, the advent of shared memory multiprocessors, and the interactions between threads and SMP machines.

Multithreading (MT) is a technique that allows one program to do multiple tasks concurrently. The basic concept of multithreaded programming has existed in research and development labs for several decades. Co-routine systems such as Concurrent Pascal and InterLisp's Spaghetti stacks were in use in the mid-70s and dealt with many of the same issues. Ada's tasks are a language-based construct that maps directly onto threads (so directly, in fact, that current Ada compilers implement tasks with threads). Burroughs shipped a commercial mainframe OS with co-routine-style ...

Get Multithreaded Programming with JAVA™ Technology now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.