Communicating Sequential Processes

In this lesson, we will briefly discuss Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP).

For a concurrent program, concurrent processes have to operate individually but with a shared data source. However, this leads to problems such as race conditions, which we will discuss in the next lesson. Hence, Tony Hoare came up with an effective solution in 1978, i.e. communication between concurrent processes. He put forth the idea of communication in concurrency in a paper titled Communicating Sequential Processes. Have a look at it here. This communication allows us to give a better structure to our concurrent approach and is a simpler solution than using locks, semaphores, etc.

According to this paper, processes have been conceptualized as individual blocks of logic which take in some input and give out some output.

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