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The programming language Erlang is based on micro-threads and asynchronous message passing. There is a (naive) belief that critical section problems cannot arise in languages based solely on message passing. The justification for this stand-point is the absence of mutex synchronization primitives, which is absolutely essential in shared-data based concurrent languages. As we will shortly see, it’s more about the design of the data operations than what means of thread…

Here in Sweden the spring has finally arrived and one of the duties I have to do is switching from winter to summer tires on my car. I did that this morning and while waiting in the garage I was reading the two articles about Actor concurrency in JavaWorld. The first article described the actor semantics and how it was realized in the Erlang programming language and the second article…