Where Are We?
In this chapter, we’ve covered a fair bit of material. We first built up a good understanding of synchronization and time as they relate to concurrent programming and many related topics. Synchronization is important and relevant to all kinds of concurrent programming, no matter whether it is performance or responsiveness motivated, in the form of fine- or coarse-grained concurrency, shared-memory or message-passing based, written in native or managed code, and so on.
Although we haven’t yet experimented with enough real mechanisms to build a concurrent program, we’re well on our way. The following section, Mechanisms, spans seven chapters and focuses on the building blocks you’ll use to build native and managed concurrent Windows programs. We’ll start with the schedulable unit of concurrency on Windows: threads.