D2C: Deterministic, Deadlock-free Concurrency

The advent of multicore processors has made concurrent programming languages mandatory. However, most concurrent programming models come with two major pitfalls: non-determinism and deadlocks. By determinism, we mean the output behavior of the program is independent of the scheduling choices (e.g., the operating system) and depends only on the input behavior. A few concurrent programming models provide deterministic behavior by providing constructs that impose additional synchronization, but the improper (or the out of order) use of these constructs leads to problems like deadlocks. In this paper, we argue for both determinism and deadlock-freedom and provide a deterministic, deadlockfree concurrent model. The model can be implemented either as programming language constructs or as a library. Any program that uses this model is guaranteed to produce the same output for a given input. Additionally, the program will never deadlock: the program will either terminate or run for ever.