Is Communicating Sequential Processes ever used in large multi threaded C++ programs?

Question

I'm currently writing a large multi threaded C++ program (> 50K LOC).

As such I've been motivated to read up alot on various techniques for handling multi-threaded code. One theory I've found to be quite cool is:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communicating_sequential_processes

And it's invented by a slightly famous guy, who's made other non-trivial contributions to concurrent programming.

However, is CSP used in practice? Can anyone point to any large application written in a CSP style?

Thanks!

Answer 1

Answering a very old question, yet it seems important that one

There is Go where CSPs are a fundamental part of the language. In the FAQ to Go, the authors write:

Concurrency and multi-threaded programming have a reputation for difficulty. We believe this is due partly to complex designs such as pthreads and partly to overemphasis on low-level details such as mutexes, condition variables, and memory barriers. Higher-level interfaces enable much simpler code, even if there are still mutexes and such under the covers.

One of the most successful models for providing high-level linguistic support for concurrency comes from Hoare's Communicating Sequential Processes, or CSP. Occam and Erlang are two well known languages that stem from CSP. Go's concurrency primitives derive from a different part of the family tree whose main contribution is the powerful notion of channels as first class objects. Experience with several earlier languages has shown that the CSP model fits well into a procedural language framework.

Projects implemented in Go are:

• Docker
• Google's download server
• Many more