Abstract

Thread-based concurrent languages currently do not provide much support to (a) avoid deadlocks, (b) treat competing threads in a fair way, and (c) allow branching depending on lock availability. This makes parallel programming difficult and error prone and thus reduces the programmer's productivity. In this paper we present a lock statement for fair atomic locking of several locks that supports (a), (b), and (c). We discuss the expressive power of the new lock statement and show the basic principles of an efficient implementation. 1 Introduction When extending a language for thread-based parallelism commonly several new features are introduced. The minimal set of features comprises mechanisms for thread creation and locking. However, by adding these features common thread problems are introduced and regrettably left for the programmer to solve. The most significant of these problems is caused by locking constructs based on the "one lock at a time" idea. With these constructs the prog...

Citations