Paper Details

@InProceedings{Welch97,
  title = "{J}ava {T}hreads in {L}ight of occam/{CSP} ({T}utorial)",
  author= "Welch, Peter H.",
  editor= "Bakkers, Andr\`{e} W. P.",
  pages = "282--282",
  booktitle= "{P}roceedings of {W}o{TUG}-20: {P}arallel {P}rogramming and {J}ava",
  isbn= "90 5199 336 6",
  year= "1997",
  month= "mar",
  abstract= "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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