Concurrency

Delay

• 12 min

Sometimes you have a shared bit of code that you only want run once, even if you want to share the result of the code. How is that like a coffee pot? Well, we'll see!

Promise

• 10 min

Sometimes we want to use another Thread to do some work, but we need the result of that work back in the main Thread. We can have the worker thread promise to put the value in a Promise. We can deref the Promise and get it out or block.

Future

• 3 min

Sometimes you want to perform a calculation in another Thread and capture it in something like a Promise in one go. That's what Future is for.

Deref

• 8 min

deref is an important function because it is used so much in Clojure. It's used to get the current value out of the reference types in Clojure, including Atoms, Refs, Vars, Futures, Promises, and Delays. There are some things you need to know about it.

Keeping state consistent with Atoms

• 10 min

Sharing state among many threads: Atoms

• 9 min

How do you use atoms to help many threads share state? The video is 10 minutes long.

Ref

• 27 min

Whenever you need to keep two or more values in a consistent relationship, Refs are available. They give you transactional properties across multiple Refs. We look at the example of calculating an average and keeping a Farenheit value consistent with a Celsius reading.

Vars

• 30 min

You'll typically use Vars in three use cases. 1) Dynamic development 2) Dynamic scope 3) testing. Most of the time, you won't even know you're using them because they're baked into the language.

Agents

• 23 min

Agents are another reference type. Each one has a queue of work to be run on it, and those bits of work get run in a thread pool. They're great because each Agent is a unit of parallelization. Three Agents mean three things can run at the same time.

Locking

• 9 min

Locking is a low-level mechanism for making sure only one Thread runs some code at the same time. It's like a lock on your bathroom. It keeps others out so you can do what you need to do in peace.

Core Async

• 9 min

Core Async is a library for concurrency brought to us by the core Clojure team. I love it because it's a game changer for complex concurrent tasks. It's very versatile and can be used to implement many common patterns.

Threads

• 8 min

The basic unit of parallelization in the JVM is the Thread. Java provides a mechanism for creating and starting native Threads. We go over how to use them.

ExecutorService

• 10 min

Java provides a library called ExecutorService. It's a thread pool fed by a queue. You send it tasks (functions) and you get back Futures with your answers.

ForkJoin

• 15 min

Fork/Join is a library that comes with Java for doing highly parallel computations. It lets you recursively break up work, do the work, and put the pieces back together.

Reducers

• 8 min

Reducers is a library that comes with Clojure. It's a wrapper around Fork/Join, so it gives you highly parallel implementations of regular functional tools like map, filter, and reduce.