ProcessJ: The JVMCSP Code Generator

We as a society have achieved greatness because we work together. There is power in numbers. However, when it comes to programming we have not been able to achieve the same level of symbiosis. This is because concurrent programming has been stigmatized as an advance and ab- stract subject allegedly harder than sequential programming. Additionally, traditional approaches to solving concurrent problems using sequential programming become unnecessarily difficult be- cause most of what newcomers are taught when it comes to concurrent programming (e.g., message passing and threads), while being technically correct, is completely irrelevant to the problems at hand. Rather than examining the preconceived notions of the problem, we stubbornly try to fix it using thread-and-lock models or non-shared memory and message passing models, making rea- soning about the concurrent behavior of the problem extremely complicated if at all even possible. Exploiting threads effectively depends on the concurrency model supported by the program- ming language being used. What is also needed is fine-grained parallelism without the explicit use of locks and without asynchronicity so programs can be made easy to reason about. I believe that ProcessJ can be the programming language that provides a bridge from todays languages to tomorrows concurrent programs. This thesis introduces ProcessJ, a new process-oriented language with Java-like syntax and CSP-based communication that uses synchronous channels. ProcessJ is cooperatively scheduled, runs on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), and allows hundreds of millions of concurrent processes on a single core. Next, I describe its implementation and features. Follow- ing this, I explain the translation scheme of ProcessJ source code to Java, and how the generated code is used to create processes that correctly cooperate in scheduling without using the Thread or Runnable Java classes