Wanted: a compositional approach to concurrency

Abstract

A key property for a development method is compositionality, because it ensures that a method can scale up to cope with large applications. Unfortunately, the inherent interference makes it difficult to devise development methods for concurrent programs (or systems). There are a number of proposals such as rely/guarantee conditions but the overall search for a satisfactory compositional approach to concurrency is an open problem. This paper identifies some issues including granularity and the problems associated with ghost variables; it also discusses using atomicity as a design abstraction.