Abstract

Concurrent programming has been ubiquitously adopted to utilise the great potential provided by modern hardware. A multitude of concurrency paradigms have been proposed, often with the aim to offer atomicity, data-race freedom, flexible coordination across different resources, deadlock freedom, ordering guarantees, ease of programming, and efficient implementation. We believe that so far, none of these paradigms have reached the sweet-spot in the design that satisfies all these requirements.

We introduce Behaviour-Oriented Concurrency (BoC), a paradigm that enables asynchronously creating atomic and ordered units of work with exclusive access to a collection of independent resources. We argue that BoC satisfies all the requirements from above. We demonstrate the practicality of the approach by implementing a C++ runtime for BoC. We argue the applicability of this paradigm through the Savina benchmark suite. We demonstrate benchmarks in this suite can be more compactly represented using BoC in place of Actors, and we observe comparable, if not better, performance.