The Relation of Version Control to Concurrent Programming

Version control helps coordinating a group of people working concurrently to achieve a shared objective. Concurrency control helps coordinating a group of threads working concurrently to achieve a shared objective. The seemingly superficial analogy between version control and concurrency control is deeper than expected. A comparison of three major flavors of version control systems (exemplified by RCS, Subversion, and Darcs) with three influential and representative approaches to concurrency control (monitors, STM, and message passing) exhibits a surprisingly close correspondences in terms of mechanism and workflow. The correspondence yields new perspectives on both, version control and concurrency control. Keywords version control, monitors, message passing, software transactional memory

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: CSSE
• Authors: Annette Bieniusa, Peter Thiemann, Stefan Wehr
• Keywords: Concurrency Control, CSSE 2008, Software Engineering, Version Control, Version Control Systems