Operating Systems: Concurrent and Distributed Software Design

4.15. Evolution of concurrency in programming languages

We now explore the support for concurrency that might be provided by a concurrent programming language. We take the extreme position that an entire system is to be written as a single concurrent program. For generality, we take the model that the system to be programmed is to run above a minimal operating system and explore the resulting requirements on the runtime system and the operating system for different types of application. In practice, some of the examples below are likely to be implemented as special-purpose systems with integrated operating system functions.

4.15.1. Examples

We consider some examples (A–D below) of systems and attempt to see how they could be programmed as a single ...