Per-worker local queue

Owner pushes/pops LIFO. Fast. Cache-friendly.

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Per-worker local queue

Owner pushes/pops LIFO. Fast. Cache-friendly.

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Stealing from the tail

Thieves take from the OTHER end (FIFO). Minimizes contention with owner.

No central queue = no bottleneck

Traditional thread pool has one queue = contention hotspot. Work stealing removes that.

Load balancing is automatic

Worker slows down → their queue grows → others steal → load rebalances. No configuration.

Where it's used

Java Fork/Join. Go goroutine scheduler. Tokio (Rust). All the modern high-throughput schedulers.