This month’s Effective Concurrency column, Prefer Futures to Baked-In “Async APIs”, is now live on DDJ’s website.
From the article:
When designing concurrent APIs, separate "what" from "how"
Let’s say you have an existing synchronous API function [called DoSomething]… Because DoSomething could take a long time to execute (whether it keeps a CPU core busy or not), and might be independent of other work the caller is doing, naturally the caller might want to execute DoSomething asynchronously. …
The question is, how should we enable that? There is a simple and correct answer, but because many interfaces have opted for a more complex answer let’s consider that one first.
I hope you enjoy it. Finally, here are links to previous Effective Concurrency columns:
The Pillars of Concurrency (Aug 2007)
How Much Scalability Do You Have or Need? (Sep 2007)
Use Critical Sections (Preferably Locks) to Eliminate Races (Oct 2007)
Apply Critical Sections Consistently (Nov 2007)
Avoid Calling Unknown Code While Inside a Critical Section (Dec 2007)
Use Lock Hierarchies to Avoid Deadlock (Jan 2008)
Break Amdahl’s Law! (Feb 2008)
Going Superlinear (Mar 2008)
Super Linearity and the Bigger Machine (Apr 2008)
Interrupt Politely (May 2008)
Maximize Locality, Minimize Contention (Jun 2008)
Choose Concurrency-Friendly Data Structures (Jul 2008)
The Many Faces of Deadlock (Aug 2008)
Lock-Free Code: A False Sense of Security (Sep 2008)
Writing Lock-Free Code: A Corrected Queue (Oct 2008)
Writing a Generalized Concurrent Queue (Nov 2008)
Understanding Parallel Performance (Dec 2008)
Measuring Parallel Performance: Optimizing a Concurrent Queue (Jan 2009)
volatile vs. volatile (Feb 2009)
Sharing Is the Root of All Contention (Mar 2009)
Use Threads Correctly = Isolation + Asynchronous Messages (Apr 2009)
Use Thread Pools Correctly: Keep Tasks Short and Nonblocking (Apr 2009)
Eliminate False Sharing (May 2009)
Break Up and Interleave Work to Keep Threads Responsive (Jun 2009)
The Power of “In Progress” (Jul 2009)
Design for Manycore Systems (Aug 2009)
Avoid Exposing Concurrency – Hide It Inside Synchronous Methods (Oct 2009)
Prefer structured lifetimes – local, nested, bounded, deterministic (Nov 2009)
Prefer Futures to Baked-In “Async APIs” (Jan 2010)