Ada is renown for its concurrency support. Parallel programming is a difficult
issue in all aspects. It is difficult to learn, to design, to program, to validate, but
for all, it is most difficult to reuse.
Yesterday I finished the version 3.0 of the Simple Components for Ada, where I tried
to summarize my experience and ideas in this area. The library among other things
contains some basic gears for dealing with concurrency.
The section 9 is devoted to implementation of some lock-free data
structures. These become more popular with new multi-core architectures.
Though Ada was not designed to provide lock-free primitives on the low-level,
for that obvious reason that this would be non-portable. It still has necessary
tools. Here I mean the pragma Atomic, which allows many interesting things to do.
The section 10 contains implementations of locking synchronization primitives.
Protected objects introduced in Ada 95 is an excellent mechanism of a great
power. Especially interesting is to explore the requeue statement. Events,
pulse events, arrays of events, mutexes, arrays of mutexes let be implemented
as protected objects. Using the requeue statement one can do a lot of things,
which appear impossible at the first glance. For example, this section
presents a programming pattern for using entry parameters in the barriers of.
It also discusses how race condition and deadlocks can be avoided when using
protected objects.
Two classical problems are considered on examples: the checkpoint
synchronization problem, and the dining philosophers one.
It is free as only it can be, the license is GMGPL I hope you will enjoy it.
http://www.dmitry-kazakov.de/ada/components.htm
