Comment by dkersten

> In all cases you want the maximum performance.

Not necessarily true. In many cases of concurrent programming, you don’t actually care about performance, you care about multiple different things happening seemingly at the same time (sure faster is nice, but not stuttering or freezing is more important). For example on a single core multitasking system (either in the past or on an embedded system today), you want multiple different tasks all running together, but this is achieved by giving them all a little chunk of execution one after the other — time slicing. The tasks are running concurrently, they all make progress together, but they share the same single thread of execution, they don’t happen in parallel. Yet one doesn’t block another, which is the important thing here.

I mean may e you “want” maximum performance, but that’s not what’s most important. Not having one task block another is what’s important.

Parallel programming is pretty much always about making things faster, by running then in parallel at the same time. The main benefit of doing that is that they both complete faster.