Summary

Chapter summary

• When threads do not depend on other threads, parallelism is preferred. Consider concurrency only when threads depend on operations of other threads.

• Because concurrency by data sharing is hard to implement correctly, favor concurrency by message passing; this is the subject of this chapter.

• spawn() and spawnLinked() start threads.

• thisTid is the thread id of the current thread.

• ownerTid is the thread id of the owner of the current thread.

• send() and prioritySend() send messages.

• receiveOnly(), receive(), and receiveTimeout() wait for messages.

• Variant matches any type of message.

• setMaxMailboxSize() limits the size of mailboxes.

• register(), unregister(), and locate() allow referring to threads by name.

• Exceptions may be thrown during message passing: MessageMismatch, OwnerTerminated, LinkTerminated, MailboxFull, and PriorityMessageException.

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