Add concurrency construct(s)

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Assessment

Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Newbie friendliness
20/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Needs clarification
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
java
Domain
compilers

Research direction

Start by comparing the proposed futures, OpenMP-style annotations, and Cilk-style spawn/sync approaches described in the issue with the Less-Java language and compiler structure. Before implementation, define the concurrency model, safety rules, affected syntax and semantics, and acceptance tests, since the issue currently names no files, entry points, or completed behavior.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

thesis

It is becoming increasingly common in high-performance computing to hear assertions that CS education programs need to integrate concurrency and parallelism patterns throughout the curriculum, including even the intro courses.

There is perhaps some merit to these assertions; imagine how much easier parallel computing would be if students learned from the very beginning how to identify and express dependency-free computation. Some argue that this mode of programming is actually more intuitive ("perform action X on every element in this collection" is often inherently dependency-free) and that we lose something by forcing everyone to learn a procedural paradigm first, linearizing the computation unnecessarily.

However, it's unclear how best to integrate concurrency into a language like Less-Java without overly complicating the language or introducing major safety issues. Perhaps it could mean adding something similar to futures, which are already implemented in Java and thus could be relatively easy to add to Less-Java. Perhaps it could involve adding annotations that the compiler converts to threaded code, like OpenMP. Or maybe it's adding new language keywords like spawn / sync in Cilk. This is open future work.

Dominant language
Java
Stars
6
Forks
7
No merged PRs in 30d

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First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

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