Adding Concurrency to a Programming Language

A programming language that lacks facilities for concurrent programming can gain those facilities in two ways: the language can be extended with additional constructs, which will reflect a particular model of concurrency, or libraries of types and routines can be written with different libraries implementing different models. This paper examines the two approaches, for object-oriented and non-object-oriented languages. Examples show that concurrency interacts extensively with traditional programming language constructs, and that general elementary facilities for concurrency must be implemented at extremely low levels--the assembly language level, in some cases--and hence that safe support for concurrency requires language extension.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1992
• Where: C++
• Authors: Peter A. Buhr, G. Ditchfeld
• Keywords: C++ 1992, Concurrency Requires Language, Programming Language, Programming Language Constructs