Practical framework for contract-based concurrent object-oriented programming (original) (raw)

2007 Foreword CONCURRENT programming, we have been told many times, is difficult. (The adjective difficult is usually embellished in this context with one of: inherently, intrinsically, extremely, or at least very.) Boyapati, Lee, and Rinard [28] warn against the pitfalls of widely used multithreading: Multithreaded programming is difficult and error-prone. Synchronization errors (...) are among the most difficult programming errors to detect, reproduce, and eliminate. Sutter and Larus [135] point the mismatch between existing techniques and practical needs: Not only are todays languages and tools inadequate to transform applications into parallel programs, but also it is difficult to find parallelism in mainstream applications , and — worst of all — concurrency requires programmers to think in a way humans find difficult. Harris, Herlihy et al. [63] observe the lack of modularity in current programming models: A particular source of concern is that even correctly-implemented concur...