The Synchronous Blog

Concurrency is one of those terms that everyone has an intuition about its definition until needs to write about it, realizing that the concept is too open to just use “concurrency”.

Follows the first phrase in Wikipedia’s entry for “Concurrency”:

In computer science, concurrency is a property of systems in which several computations are executing simultaneously, and potentially interacting with each other.

By using the words simultaneously and interacting, this definition captures (for me) the essence of concurrency.

One of the fundamental properties of concurrent systems is their execution model, that is, when should the concurrent computations (I’ll call them concurrent entities) in the system run, and what are the rules that an entity should obey while running.

• Asynchronous Concurrency

In asynchronous execution, entities are in charge of their own control flow and execute independently of each other. Hence, each entity has its own notion of time, not shared globally. The decision to synchronize with other parts of the system is also internal to each entity, and not enforced by the surrounding environment. Depending on the concurrency model in use, these entities are known as threads, actors, processes, tasks, etc.

• Synchronous Concurrency

In synchronous execution, the system flow is controlled by the environment, and internal entities must execute at its pace, in permanent synchrony. Time is now shared between entities and is represented as time steps or as a series of events, both triggered by the surrounding environment.

In my personal experience, when saying “concurrency” people assume asynchronous concurrency, excluding all synchronous reactive languages/systems.

For example, if I state that event-driven programming is a concurrency model, I’ll probably be inquired about this position.

However, if you agree with Wikipedia’s definition and thinks about an event-driven implemented game with hundreds of entities interacting, how can it not be considered “concurrent”?

In a paper from Gerard Berry [1], this “prejudice” is also commented:

Being somewhat unclassical compared to prevalent CSP or CCS based models, it took more time for the synchronous model to be accepted in the mainstream Computer Science community.

Execution model is just one property of concurrent systems. I did not discuss here communication, synchronization, parallelism, determinism…

Maybe it is time to build something like a “Taxonomy for Concurrency”, enumerating all recurrent properties found in concurrency models and languages. Does anyone know about an existing work in this direction?

[1] Gérard Berry, The foundations of Esterel, Proof, language, and interaction: essays in honour of Robin Milner, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2000

Good news received last week:

Dear Mr. Francisco Sant’Anna,

I am pleased to confirm that your paper “LuaGravity, a Reactive Language
Based on Implicit Invocation” has been accepted for presentation and
publication at SBLP 2009.

All papers went through a rigorous reviewing process by the program
committee. Out of 30 research papers and 3 tutorials submitted, 12
papers and 1 tutorial were accepted.

Please make sure that in the preparation of the final paper you
carefully address the reviewers’ comments. Additionally, at least one
author is required to register in the conference for your paper to
appear in the proceedings.

Congratulations again on having your paper accepted. We look forward to
seeing you in Gramado!

Reviewer’s comments already addressed and final version submitted! One reviewer in particular pointed several constructive observations, which we took very seriously in the final version.

Follows the abstract for the paper:

The reactive programming paradigm covers a wide range of applications, such as
games and multimedia systems.
Mainstream languages do not offer proper support for reactive programming,
lacking language-level primitives that focus on synchronism and interactions
within application parts.
We propose an imperative reactive language, called LuaGravity, based on
unconventional implicit invocation mechanisms.
LuaGravity allows dataflow programming, sequential imperative execution, and
deterministic use of shared-memory.
With this work, we intend to unite the essential features of reactive languages
while keeping a convenient imperative style of programming.

SBLP [1] is the main Brazilian congress on programming languages. This year it will be held in Gramado on August 18-21.

[1] http://sblp2009.ucpel.tche.br/