Programming with Concurrency: Threads, Actors, and Coroutines
Zhen Li, Eileen Kraemer · 2013
We describe an elective upper-division undergraduate / graduate course that focuses on programming with concurrency and puts into practice topics from the PDC curriculum. We introduce three approaches to concurrent programming: threads (using Java), Actors (using Scala) and Co routines (using Python) for both shared memory and message passing applications. We also address synchronization issues such as race conditions, conditional synchronization, deadlock and fairness. We use a pseudo code notation to support language-independent evaluation of students' comprehension of concurrency concepts. Students engage in intensive lab sessions to implement solutions to classical problems in concurrency. We present data analyses that we hope will provide insight and inform the pedagogy associated with concurrent programming.