Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship

13Concurrency

by Brett L. Schuchert

“Objects are abstractions of processing. Threads are abstractions of schedule.”

—James O. Coplien¹

1. Private correspondence.

Writing clean concurrent programs is hard—very hard. It is much easier to write code that executes in a single thread. It is also easy to write multithreaded code that looks fine on the surface but is broken at a deeper level. Such code works fine until the system is placed under stress.

In this chapter we discuss the need for concurrent programming, and the difficulties it presents. We then present several recommendations for dealing with those difficulties, and writing clean concurrent ...