Concurrent programming in Java and Eiffel

Concurrent programming is more difficult than usual sequential programming, but with the development of multi-core processors concurrent programming is becoming a necessity in daily work.

ABSTRACT

The paper presents some “old” concurrent programming techniques in Java, versions 1 to 4, and some newer techniques made possible by version 5, and further improved in versions 6 and 7. Unfortunately, concurrent programming is more difficult than usual sequential programming, but with the development of multi-core processors concurrent programming is becoming a necessity in daily work.

There are some attempts (time will show if they are successful) to make concurrent programming easier. A different approach in comparison to that in Java (and similar to Java are C# and even C++), which should facilitate concurrent programming, is the Simple Concurrent Object Oriented Programming (SCOOP), a model that has been implemented in OOPL Eiffel language, but there is a chance it could spread to other OOPL languages (e.g. there are some test implementations in Java.)