Hacker News Reader

Comment by 63 | Hacker News Reader

I'm interested in the concept of concurrency, but is there anywhere that it would be useful outside of scientific applications and operating systems? It feels like a powerful paradigm to master but I'm just not sure it's worth the investment for the average developer.

View on HN

It’s a common misconception but there is a difference between concurrency and parallelism.

Concurrency is very useful across all aspects of the stack including OS code, and even web app code.

Your comment about “usefulness” is likely about Parallelism. Which I agree with you is typically only useful in abstractions like OS code and even web frameworks.

For what it's worth, if I hadn't learned about low-level concurrency primitives in Rust, I wouldn't have had the mental framework to succeed in creating a realtime websocket service in Python.

My two cents is that learning is enriching and inspiring. If you learn concepts from one context you can apply them in another in new and surprising ways. Don't put yourself in a box like "I'm just a normal developer, I don't know about that OS stuff"; learn about the things that excite you and worry about applying them later. Specialization is for ants.

But if this advice isn't useful to you, feel free to discard it.

I've used tons of concurrency in Android apps, iOS apps, Unreal Engine games, C++ code running a Raspberry Pi drone, embedded Android telemetry (Java/C++), and C++ AR/VR high-resolution realtime media streaming systems.

If you can wield concurrency, you can use it anywhere. It's liberating to be able to drastically improve the performance of your code by leveraging the multi-core processors our software runs on these days.

I've never done any OS work nor scientific computing.

Most web servers / apps. Just think about how you would test a simple register endpoint for example.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com