Synchronous C++: a language for interactive applications

Synchronous C++ defines active objects that contain their own execution threads and can communicate with each other by means of synchronizing method calls. The author shows how to model programs in sC++ and compares sC++ with event driven programming. He focuses on examples in which the dynamic and functional models dominate and the object model is secondary. In doing so, he proposes a mapping between the elements of all three models and sC++ statements. Several other concepts have been proposed to extend OO languages to concurrency: delayed evaluations (a concept that proposes to launch each method on a separate thread, as in Actors), processes orthogonal to the objects (Ada), asynchronous channels and exceptions (Eiffel), and others. However, the researchers who proposed these solutions emphasized the improvements of speed they expected from achieving concurrency, rather than the characteristics that make concurrency suitable for the analysis and the implementation of specifications such as the ones provided by models