A review of Paul E. McKenney's free online textbook on parallel programming, written by someone with a decade of TLA+ and distributed systems experience. The author reflects on how attending a conference talk about concurrent lock-free garbage collection revealed gaps in their concurrency knowledge despite their distributed systems background.
Background
Paul E. McKenney is a prominent Linux kernel developer known for implementing the RCU (Read-Copy-Update) synchronization mechanism. His textbook covers practical aspects of concurrent programming that complement theoretical approaches like TLA+.
- Source
- Lobsters
- Published
- Sep 21, 2026 at 10:28 PM
- Score
- 6.0 / 10