Principles of Concurrent and Distributed Programming, Second Edition

Chapter 9. Spaces

Synchronization primitives that are based upon shared memory or synchronous communications have the disadvantage of tight coupling, both in time and in space. To communicate using synchronous channels, both the sending and the receiving processes must exist simultaneously, and the identity of the channel must be accessible to both. The Linda model decouples the processes involved in synchronization. It also enables shared data to be persistent, that is, data can exist after the termination of the process that created them and used by processes that are activated only later. The properties of loose coupling and persistence exist in the file systems of operating systems, but Linda provides an abstract model that can be implemented ...