Book review: Is parallel programming hard, and, if so, what can you do about it?

In one line

Here are my thoughts on the free online textbook Is Parallel Programming Hard, And, If So, What Can You Do About It? by Paul E. McKenney, author of the Linux kernel’s RCU synchronization mechanism.

Opening excerpt

Here I’ll talk about the mindset/life phase and physical setting I was in when I started reading this textbook. This might be like the tedious personal flavor preamble they have on recipe websites so skip ahead if that does not interest you.

My professional life had revolved around TLA⁺ & distributed systems for the past decade, and I was thinking it was time for a change. A transitional and emotionally tumultuous period! In 2022 I had tried (and failed) to move to Lean, hoping to acquire an unbelievably niche & nonexistent job as the guy who formalizes researchers’ quantum information processing results for them. I burned out on that, which given recent advances in automated theorem proving might have been my temporarily-prescient nervous system dodging me a bullet. Thus was the history & context in which I attended the 2026 Software Should Work conference in Columbia, Missouri.

The conference had a lot of good talks, but I especially enjoyed the one on Fil-C by Filip Pizlo:

(Excerpted from the original; full article via the source link below.)

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