[aphyr]

I agree. The future of server programming is also not spawning multiple child processes. The question I have is how far off is that future? I know that most of my web applications today simply run in multiple spawned OS processes.

Barring a massive shift in hardware architectures, shared access by cooperating threads is your only option for high-performance shared state. Look at core counts vs core flops for the last five years. Look at Intel's push for NUMA architectures. This is a long-scale trend forced by fundamental physical constraints with present architectures, and I don't see it changing any time soon.

Anyone telling you shared state is irrelevant is just pushing the problem onto someone else: e.g., a database.