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)
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