Linguistic support for atomic data types

Abstract

The problems of concurrency and failures in distributed systems can be addressed by implementing applications in terms of atomic data types: data types whose objects provide serializability and recoverability for transactions using them. The specifications of the types can be used to permit high levels of concurrency among transactions while still ensuring atomicity. However, highly concurrent implementations can be quite complicated. In this paper we analyze the expressive power of existing proposals for language features intended to support the implementation of atomic types. We illustrate several limitations of existing proposals and propose a new approach that avoids these problems.