CPC: programming with a massive number of lightweight threads

Gabriel Kerneis (1) , Juliusz Chroboczek (1)

1 PPS - Preuves, Programmes et Systèmes

Threads are a convenient and modular abstraction for writing concurrent programs, but often fairly expensive. The standard alternative to threads, event-loop programming, allows much lighter units of concurrency, but leads to code that is difficult to write and even harder to understand. Continuation Passing C (CPC) is a translator that converts a program written in threaded style into a program written with events and native system threads, at the programmer's choice. Together with two undergraduate students, we taught ourselves how to program in CPC by writing Hekate, a massively concurrent network server designed to efficiently handle tens of thousands of simultaneously connected peers. In this paper, we describe a number of programming idioms that we learnt while writing Hekate; while some of these idioms are specific to CPC, many should be applicable to other programming systems with sufficiently cheap threads.

Mots clés: concurrency; lightweight threads; network programming

Domaines: Langage de programmation [cs.PL]

Gabriel Kerneis, Juliusz Chroboczek. CPC: programming with a massive number of lightweight threads. PLACES'11, Apr 2011, Saarbrücken, Germany. pp. 30--34. ⟨hal-00563369⟩