Assessing design patterns for concurrency

Abstract

Design patterns are language-independent software-engineering techniques for solving recurring problems within a particular problem-context. Despite their generality, they have been primarily adopted by, and for the most part developed within, the object-oriented community. As a result, some pattern definitions are sometimes expressed with objects-oriented machinery in mind such as classes and inheritance. We test the paradigm independence of these design patterns and investigate the viability of adopting existing patterns from the object-oriented paradigm to the message-passing concurrency setting. By porting these techniques to the new programming paradigm, we expect to inherit the benefits associated with these design patterns. We achieve these goals by implementing a suite of design patterns as reusable modules in Erlang, an industry-strength message-passing language for programming concurrent distributed systems.