Efficient and Reasonable Object-Oriented Concurrency

TL;DR

This paper introduces an optimized execution model for SCOOP, enhancing concurrency, safety, and performance in threaded programming, achieving significant speedups over existing solutions.

Contribution

It proposes extensions to SCOOP's semantics for increased concurrency, deadlock avoidance, and performance, along with an efficient runtime implementation.

Findings

15x performance improvement over baseline

2x faster than other safe concurrent languages

Effective in both coordination and data manipulation benchmarks

Abstract

Making threaded programs safe and easy to reason about is one of the chief difficulties in modern programming. This work provides an efficient execution model for SCOOP, a concurrency approach that provides not only data race freedom but also pre/postcondition reasoning guarantees between threads. The extensions we propose influence both the underlying semantics to increase the amount of concurrent execution that is possible, exclude certain classes of deadlocks, and enable greater performance. These extensions are used as the basis an efficient runtime and optimization pass that improve performance 15x over a baseline implementation. This new implementation of SCOOP is also 2x faster than other well-known safe concurrent languages. The measurements are based on both coordination-intensive and data-manipulation-intensive benchmarks designed to offer a mixture of workloads.