Generalized Committed Choice

Abstract. We present a generalized committed choice construct for concurrent programs that interact with a shared store. The generalized committed choice (GCC) allows multiple computations from different alternatives to occur concurrently and later commit to one of them. GCC generalizes the traditional committed choice in Dijkstra’s Guarded Command Language to handle don’t know non-determinism and also allows for speculative computation. The main contribution of the paper is to introduce the GCC programming construct and the associated semantics framework for formalizing GCC. We give some experimental results which show that the power of GCC can be made practical.