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Understanding Concurrency, Parallelism and JavaScript

Written at 2024-09-08 Up until now, I was not aware that concurrency and parallelism were actually different things since they are often used interchangeably by some. I just learned that this is not the case while reading Chapter 9 of the book “Clojure for the Brave and True.” This made me want to learn more about concepts related to concurrency and parallelism, especially concerning the programming language I know best: JavaScript.

So, if you need different processes to operate in the same state, you might need some sort of an IPC mechanism like shared memory segments, pipes, message queues, or even databases. Although your JavaScript program runs in a single-threaded environment with a sequential execution flow, blocking tasks such as IO operations are degelated to the Node.js Worker Threads. As long as you avoid having complicated logic that relies on async functions with nested callbacks, it is certain that the flow of execution remains uninterrupted, basically sequential.

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