Featherweight concurrency in a portable assembly language

  • Simon Peyton Jones ,
  • Norman Ramsey

What abstractions should a reusable code generator, such as C–, provide to make it easy for a language implementor to compile a highly concurrent language? The implementation of concurrency is typically tightly interwoven with the code generator and run-time system of the high-level language. Our contribution is to tease out the tricky low-level concurrency mechanisms and to package them in an elegant way, so they can be reused by many front ends.

(This paper was rejected by PLDI’01 and is still awaiting a New Life.)