Completely follow design patterns and guidelines for concurrent programming.

Testing the code rigorously to sort out obvious concurrency issues and hoping that all problems have been resolved.

Programmers often resort to exhaustive search tactics to find errors: The complex nature of concurrency leaves the programmer in doubt. Programs are often prone to errors that not obvious and surface under arbitrary and unrepeatable situations. Programmers have shied away from parallel programming because errors that arise in this method of programming are notoriously difficult to track down. The difficulty of verifying program correctness has been the primary hindrance in the field.

Difficulty verifying program correctness.

The amount of storage space needed increases with number of jobs.

The amount of time user waits increases linearly.

Because the amount of resources doesn’t increase, programs that need to use the same resource must wait. Unlike parallelism, where n tasks run on n processors, in concurrency, n tasks run on 1 processor. While concurrency offers great potential for faster computation, it is not without fault.

By reducing the errors of CSP, Hoare has enabled computer scientists to fully exploit the capacity of CPUs.īack to top Problems of concurrency and Hoare’s solution In his book, Learning CSP (the third most quoted book in Computer Science), Hoare uses calculus to show that it is possible to work with deadlocks and nondeterminism as if they were terminal events in ordinary processes.

With CSP, Hoare introduced a precise theory that can mathematically guarantee programs to be free of the common problems of concurrency. While concurrency has many advantages over traditional sequential programming, it has failed to gain a popular audience because of its erroneous nature. Hoare recognized that a machine with hardware that is 10 times as fast running a code that consumes 10 times more resources is not an improvement. Historically, software advancement has mainly relied upon improvements in hardware that create enable faster CPUs and larger memory. Tony Hoare introduced Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP) in 1978 as a language to describe interactions between concurrent processes.

Csp ex