Concurrent Programming Using The Disruptor

The Disruptor is an open source concurrent programming framework developed by LMAX, a financial exchange based in London. While many organisations like to protect the cool code they write, LMAX open sourced the framework that makes their exchange so fast. This has had a number of measurable benefits: 1) The performance of the code, whilst always ground-breaking, has substantially improved since accepting suggestions from the community 2) The Disruptor has been a key recruitment tool, showcasing some of the great work we do at LMAX

The most interesting thing about it though is how the Disruptor has promoted discussions about approaches to writing high performance code, and shown that Java is a serious contender in this space.

Contrary to the current trend of hiding multi-threaded concerns behind languages or frameworks, the Disruptor provides a way to do quite the opposite – to enable developers to think about how to parallelise their architecture in a straightforward and easy to code fashion. In this presentation, Trisha Gee from LMAX will show examples of how to use the Disruptor to share data between threads, proving that concurrent programming doesn’t always have to be complicated.