[habibur]

I don't know what others are reading.

The article basically says that when you have multiple suppliers or consumers, the "order" of the queue loses meaning. It turns into an "unordered" pool of data. Therefore focus should be shifted from maintain a "queue of data" to a "bag of data".

[theamk]

No, order does not loose meaning. You can have "ordered" or "unordered" or "almost ordered", and pretending otherwise looses meaning.

Even slightly-misordered queue has very useful fairness guarantees - for a queue of size N, an item will spend O(N) steps in the queue.

"Bags of data" have no guarantees of that sort at all. By their definition, an item can spent an arbitrary time in the "bag", which makes those "bags" pretty useless for many real-time use cases.

As an example, imagine the bag where readers and writers always prefer smaller indices. So if an item gets stuck at the last slot, it will never gets picked up as long as new items are coming. This is a pretty useless behavior which is yet totally compatible with "bag of data" definition.

[RHSeeger]

> The article basically says that when you have multiple suppliers or consumers, the "order" of the queue loses meaning.

The disconnect to me is that the title says "it's not a queue". It is a queue, its just (as you note) not being used in a way where it being a queue provides any benefit.