The Art of Multiprocessor Programming

Appendix A. Software Basics

Introduction

This appendix describes the basic programming language constructs needed to understand our examples and to write your own concurrent programs. Mostly, we use Java, but the same ideas could be equally well expressed in other high-level languages and libraries. Here, we review the basic software concepts needed to understand this text, first in Java, and then in other important models such as C# or the Pthreads library for C and C++. Unfortunately, our discussion here must be incomplete: if in doubt, consult the current documentation for the language or library of interest.

Java

The Java programming language uses a concurrency model in which threads and objects are separate entities.^[1] Threads manipulate objects ...