Monitor (synchronization) - History

History

C. A. R. Hoare and Per Brinch Hansen developed the idea of monitors around 1972, based on earlier ideas of their own and of E. W. Dijkstra. Brinch Hansen was the first to implement monitors. Hoare developed the theoretical framework and demonstrated their equivalence to semaphores.

Monitors were soon used to structure inter-process communication in the Solo operating system.

Programming languages that have supported monitors include

  • Ada since Ada 95 (as protected objects)
  • C# (and other languages that use the .NET Framework)
  • Concurrent Euclid
  • Concurrent Pascal
  • D
  • Delphi (Delphi 2009 and above, via TObject.Monitor)
  • Java (via the wait and notify methods)
  • Mesa
  • Modula-3
  • Python (via threading.Condition object)
  • Ruby
  • Squeak Smalltalk
  • Turing, Turing+, and Object-Oriented Turing
  • μC++

A number of libraries have been written that allow monitors to be constructed in languages that do not support them natively. When library calls are used, it is up to the programmer to explicitly mark the start and end of code executed with mutual exclusion. Pthreads is one such library.

Read more about this topic:  Monitor (synchronization)

Famous quotes containing the word history:

    Racism is an ism to which everyone in the world today is exposed; for or against, we must take sides. And the history of the future will differ according to the decision which we make.
    Ruth Benedict (1887–1948)

    The view of Jerusalem is the history of the world; it is more, it is the history of earth and of heaven.
    Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881)

    The history of men’s opposition to women’s emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.
    Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)