A study on the most popular questions about concurrent programming

Abstract

Concurrent programming is notably known as a hard discipline. Over the last few years, great strides have been made in improving concurrent programming abstractions, techniques, and tools to ease concurrent programming practice. However, little effort has been placed on assessing what are the real-world problems faced by developers when writing concurrent applications. In this paper, we describe an empirical investigation of the top-250 most popular questions about concurrent programming on StackOverflow. We observed that even though some questions (22.94%) are related to practical problems (e.g., “how to fix this concurrency bug”), most of them (66.23%) are related to basic concepts (e.g., “what is a mutex?”), which were created by well- experienced StackOverflow users. Curiously, we did not find any question about how to use concurrent programming techniques to improve application performance.