Seven Concurrency Models in Seven Weeks

Chapter 6Communicating Sequential Processes

If you’re a car nut like me, it’s easy to focus on the vehicle and forget about the roads it travels on. It’s fascinating to debate the relative merits of turbo-charging versus natural aspiration or a mid- versus a front-engine layout, forgetting that the most important aspect of a car has nothing to do with any of these things. Where you can go and how fast you can get there is primarily defined by the road network, not the car.

Similarly, the features and capabilities of a message-passing system are not primarily defined by the code between which messages are exchanged or their content, but by the transport over which they travel.

In this chapter we’ll look at a model that has surface similarities ...