Event Synchronization by Lightweight Message Passing

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.