[tdeck]

I was a freshman CS student in 2010-2011 and we learned multi-threaded programming in our first year.

[varjag]

Sure but you would have learned it in 1995 too.

[jghn]

As a freshman CS student? Granted things were changing rapidly in the 90s, but this wasn't the case my freshman year a couple of years prior. I know that I was aware of the concept of threading by my sophomore or junior year, and by the time I graduated had encountered them first hand. I'm not sure we even covered multitasking (fork() and friends) at all in my freshman year, but of that I'm far less certain.

[radomir_cernoch]

From my freshman years around 2005, I vaguely remember that multi-thread GUI apps were:

- a way to avoid blocking the UI,

- tool to gain some perf. on new fancy multi-core processors,

- making the code much harder to read and debug, which often makes them a victim in a cost-benefit analysis.

[varjag]

Point is the programming paradigm of POSIX threads or multitasking wasn't a new concept then and likewise been in the curriculum for a while. Multi-core only brought a new level of performance to it.

There were in fact attempts for new concurrency paradigms (like Software Transactional Memory) which however led nowhere outside academia.

[winstonprivacy]

I learned about it in 1991.

[aa-jv]

Threads are but one way to handle the concurrency/parallelism problem on a given set of processors, old or new.

So what are some other ways of handling multi-core code that you were taught?