What is the difference between concurrency and parallelism?

Concurrency - Things happening within the overlapping time periods.

parallelism / TRUE concurrency - Things happening simultaneously.

Example driven explanation

The parallelism is a subset of concurrency.

What is concurrent but not parallel?

Suppose a program has 2 asynchronous code blocks, A and B.
```
async function a() {
  some_computation()
  network_io()
}
async function b() {
  some_computation()
  network_io()
}

// START
const c = a() // A
const d = b() // B
// At this point both a and b are running concurrently
join(c, d) // wait for both a, b to finish execution
// END
```
The language compiler compiles A and B into a representation which the language runtime understands, Suppose the language runtime is single threaded, this means it only either runs A or B, but not both at the same time, by some heuristic / rule.
The A and B are still concurrent between START and END, since both make progress between START and END.
Suppose the language runtime schedules A to go first. After running some_computation, there is an IO call in A. This could be a network device interaction for instance. Since A is now stuck, the runtime decides that B can continue execution, while A waits for a response from the network device.
Throughout this process execution is sequential, hence it is not parallel, only concurrent.

Specification driven explanation

2022-01-10