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Programming Concepts Intermediate

What is Concurrency?

The ability of a program to manage multiple tasks that can make progress during overlapping time periods.

Concurrency is about dealing with multiple things at once (structure), while parallelism is about doing multiple things at once (execution). Concurrency models include threads (shared memory), processes (isolated memory), async/await (cooperative), and actors (message passing).

Challenges include race conditions, deadlocks, livelocks, and starvation. Synchronization primitives (mutexes, semaphores, channels) coordinate access to shared resources. Modern languages increasingly favor message passing and async/await over shared-memory threading.

Related Terms

Algorithm
A step-by-step procedure for solving a problem or performing a computation, defined as a finite sequence of instructions.
Stack
A data structure that follows Last-In-First-Out (LIFO) ordering, where elements are added and removed from the same end (top).
Race Condition
A bug that occurs when the behavior of software depends on the timing or order of uncontrolled events like thread scheduling.
Factory Pattern
A creational design pattern that provides an interface for creating objects without specifying their exact classes.
Object-Oriented Programming (OOP)
A programming paradigm that organizes software design around objects containing data and behavior.
Stack vs Heap
Two memory regions: the stack stores function call data with automatic cleanup, while the heap stores dynamically allocated objects.
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