Abstract

Transactional events are a recent concurrency abstraction that combines first-class synchronous message-passing events with all-or-nothing transactions. Transactional events provide both a sequencing combinator, which permits the description of behaviors in which multiple potential synchronization actions (including communications between threads) either all occur in sequence or none of them occur, and a nondeterministic choice combinator, which permits the description of behaviors in which exactly one of a set of potential synchronization actions occurs. While prior work gave a semantics and an implementation for transactional events, it provided no guarantees about which of the many non-deterministic executions might be exhibited by a program. For concurrent systems, like transactional events, it is natural to expect certain fairness conditions to hold on executions. Intuitively, fairness guarantees that any system component that could (sufficiently often) make progress does, in fact, make progress. In this work, we investigate fairness for transactional events. We give a rigorous definition of fair program executions in transactional events, describe a refined operational semantics that guarantees fair executions, and discuss restrictions and assumptions necessary for the correctness of an implementation based on the refined semantics. This is a companion technical report, providing additional commentary and proof details, to a paper [1] appearing in Implementation and Application of Functional Languages: 23rd International Symposium (IFL'11).

Publication Date

2012

Comments

The final publication is available at link.springer.com via https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-34407-7_2

Note: imported from RIT’s Digital Media Library running on DSpace to RIT Scholar Works in February 2014.

Document Type

Article

Department, Program, or Center

Computer Science (GCCIS)

Campus

RIT – Main Campus

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