🎁 New User? Get 20% off your first purchase with code NEWUSER20 · ⚡ Instant download · 🔒 Secure checkout Register Now →
Menu

Categories

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

Queue
A data structure that follows First-In-First-Out (FIFO) ordering, where elements are added at the rear and removed from the front.
Recursion
A programming technique where a function calls itself to solve a problem by breaking it into smaller subproblems.
Event-Driven Architecture
A software design pattern where components communicate by producing and consuming events rather than direct method calls.
Regex (Regular Expression)
A sequence of characters that defines a search pattern, used for string matching, validation, and text manipulation.
Stack vs Heap
Two memory regions: the stack stores function call data with automatic cleanup, while the heap stores dynamically allocated objects.
Composition over Inheritance
A design principle favoring object composition (has-a relationships) over class inheritance (is-a relationships) for code reuse.
 View All Programming Concepts Terms →