A thread-safe Term Library

Abstract

Terms are one of the fundamental mathematical concepts in computing. E.g. every expression characterisable by a context free grammar is a term. We developed a thread-safe Term Library. The biggest challenge is to implement hyper-efficient multi-reader/single-writer mutual exclusion for which we designed the new busy-forbidden protocol. Model checking is used to show both the correctness of the protocol and the Term Library. Benchmarks show this Term Library has little overhead compared to sequential versions and outperforms them already on two processors. Using the new library in an existing state space generation tool, very substantial speed ups can be obtained.