The history, present, and future of concurrency

In the following sub-topics, we will discuss the past, present, and future of concurrency.

The field of concurrent programming has enjoyed significant popularity since the early days of computer science. In this section, we will discuss how concurrent programming started and evolved throughout its history, its current usage in the industry, and some predictions regarding how concurrency will be used in the future.

The history of concurrency

The concept of concurrency has been around for quite some time. The idea developed from early work on railroads and telegraphy in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and some terms have even survived to this day (such as semaphore, which indicates a variable that controls access to a shared resource in concurrent programs). Concurrency was first applied to address the question of how to handle multiple trains on the same railroad system, in order to avoid collisions and maximize efficiency, and how...