Ask HN: How important is parallel and concurrent programming?

[ynot269]

Currently I'm taking a parallel programming course at school and its required. The course deals with open MP, is this common/useful outside of school? I've had a few internships and it was rare that I ever saw code that dealt with async, waits, sleeping, etc anything related to parallel programming. I'm about to graduate in May and will be working in a role that deals with cloud and Kubernetes and containers. How familiar should I be with parallel programming outside of open MP if any? It seems nowadays instead of spinning up multiple threads, its easier/cheaper? to spin up multiple instances instead.

[onion2k]

Front end web development is pretty much all asynchronous these days. It's mostly promise-based but it's moving towards proper async and observables, and it's possible to do 'threads' using workers that communicate over a message bus. It was possible to use array buffers to share memory between the main thread and a worker too but that's currently disabled everywhere because of Spectre (the CPU bug, not the criminal organisation in James Bond movies).