Event Synchronization by Lightweight Message Passing

TL;DR

This paper introduces a lightweight implementation of event synchronization abstractions in Concurrent Haskell, using a novel distributed protocol that preserves standard semantics and simplifies complex manipulations.

Contribution

It presents a new distributed synchronization protocol enabling lightweight implementation of event abstractions in Concurrent Haskell, maintaining standard semantics.

Findings

Efficient implementation of event abstractions in Concurrent Haskell.

Preservation of standard event semantics and symmetry.

Simplification over previous complex manipulations.

Abstract

Concurrent ML's events and event combinators facilitate modular concurrent programming with first-class synchronization abstractions. A standard implementation of these abstractions relies on fairly complex manipulations of first-class continuations in the underlying language. In this paper, we present a lightweight implementation of these abstractions in Concurrent Haskell, a language that already provides first-order message passing. At the heart of our implementation is a new distributed synchronization protocol. In contrast with several previous translations of event abstractions in concurrent languages, we remain faithful to the standard semantics for events and event combinators; for example, we retain the symmetry of $\mathtt{choose}$ for expressing selective communication.