I recently had the opportunity to catch up with Alex Miller and hear this thoughts on concurrency. In this podcast, Alex talks about various concurrency models, such as actors, agents, and dataflow (just to name a few). Alex does a great job of explaining why parallel programming is challenging (to do correctly, that is) and is able to elaborate on each model’s pros and cons.
Alex has long been a source of expertise in the world of parallel programming — in fact, I first met Alex at CodeMash a few years ago, where he gave a presentation on the actor model (he talked about Scala, Erlang, and a few Java libraries). He’s also written a few articles on the subject, most recently having published “Resolve common concurrency problems with GPars” on IBM DeveloperWorks.
Have a listen to Alex and while you are at it, don’t forget to read his most recent article. Plus, go ahead and read my article on Kilim (which is an actor library for Java), baby!
