Title
Towards Composable Concurrency Abstractions
Abstract
In the past decades, many different programming models for managing concurrency in applications have been proposed, such as the actor model, Communicating Sequential Processes, and Software Transactional Memory. The ubiquity of multi-core processors has made harnessing concurrency even more important. We observe that modern languages, such as Scala, Clojure, or F#, provide not one, but multiple concurrency models that help developers manage concurrency. Large end-user applications are rarely built using just a single concurrency model. Programmers need to manage a responsive UI, deal with file or network I/O, asynchronous workflows, and shared resources. Different concurrency models facilitate different requirements. This raises the issue of how these concurrency models interact, and whether they are composable. After all, combining different concurrency models may lead to subtle bugs or inconsistencies.In this paper, we perform an in-depth study of the concurrency abstractions provided by the Clojure language. We study all pairwise combinations of the abstractions, noting which ones compose without issues, and which do not. We make an attempt to abstract from the specifics of Clojure, identifying the general properties of concurrency models that facilitate or hinder composition.
Year
DOI
Venue
2014
10.4204/EPTCS.155.8
ELECTRONIC PROCEEDINGS IN THEORETICAL COMPUTER SCIENCE
Field
DocType
Issue
Isolation (database systems),Programming language,Concurrency,Computer science,Multiversion concurrency control,Clojure,Concurrent object-oriented programming,Distributed concurrency control,Non-lock concurrency control,Optimistic concurrency control
Journal
155
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
2075-2180
1
0.36
References 
Authors
3
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Janwillem Swalens110.36
Stefan Marr212421.54
Joeri De Koster3338.78
Tom Van Cutsem445329.70