Implementing deterministic declarative concurrency using sieves

Abstract

The predominant thread-based approach to concurrent programming is bug-prone, difficult to reason about, and does not scale well to large numbers of processors. Sieves provide a simple way of adding deterministic declarative concurrency to imperative programming languages. Sieve programs have a straightforward semantics, are not significantly more difficult to reason about than sequential imperative programs, and should scale to large numbers of processors as well as different processor architectures. Copyright 2007 ACM.