WoTUG - The place for concurrent processes

Paper Details


%T Java Threads in Light of occam/CSP (Tutorial)
%A Peter H. Welch
%E André W. P. Bakkers
%B Proceedings of WoTUG\-20: Parallel Programming and Java
%X Java provides support for parallel computing through a model
   that is built into the language itself. However, the
   designers of Java chose to be fairly conservative and
   settled for the contepts of threads and monitors. Monitors
   were developed by Tony Hoare in the early 1970s as a
   structued way of using semaphores to control access to
   shared resources. Hoare moved away from this, in the late
   1970s, to develop the theory of Communicating Processes
   (CSP). One reason for this was that the semantics of
   monitors and threads are not WYSIWIG, so that designing
   robust parallel algorithms at this level is seriously hard.
   Fortunately, it is possible to introduce the CSP model into
   Java through sets of classes implemented on top of its
   monitor support. By restricting interaction between active
   Java objects to CSP synchronisation primitives, Jav thread
   semantics become compositional and systems with arbitrary
   levels of complexity become possible. Multi\-threaded Web
   applets and distributed applications become simpler to
   design and implement, race hazards never occured,
   difficulties such as starvation, deadlock and livelock are
   easier to confront and overcome, and performance is no worse
   than that obtained from directly using the raw monitor
   primitives. The advantages of teaching parallelism in Java
   purely through the CSP class libraries will be discussed.
   (These libraries were developed jointly at Kent and Oxford
   Universities in the UK and the University of Twente in the
   Netherlands.)


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