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Communicating Sequential Processes Alive

Communicating Sequential Processes
KindPaper
Published1978
StatusAlive
AuthorsC.A.R. Hoare
FieldConcurrency
Sourcedl.acm.org ↗

CSP — synchronized message passing as a formal calculus. The ancestor of occam's hardware parallelism, Go's channels, and every actor-adjacent design since.

Created by Tony Hoare

Published in CACM in August 1978, the paper modeled concurrency as processes communicating only through synchronized, unbuffered message passing — input and output commands as the primitives, guarded commands for choice.

Inmos built the transputer to run it (occam was CSP as hardware); Go's channels and select are CSP's direct descendants; the π-calculus and process algebra generally descend from its formalism. Hoare expanded it into a book in 1985 that remains the concurrency field's reference.

Sources

  1. dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/359576.359585
  2. cs.cmu.edu/~crary/819-f09/Hoare78.pdf
  3. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communicating_sequential_processes