Experience with processes and monitors in Mesa

The work

AuthorsButler W. Lampson; David D. Redell
Typearticle
Year1980
Citekeylampson1980experience

Where it appeared

Published inCommunications of the ACM
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
Volume23
Issue2
Pages105--117

Identifiers

DOI10.1145/358818.358824

Abstract

The use of monitors for describing concurrency has been much discussed in the literature. When monitors are used in real systems of any size, however, a number of problems arise which have not been adequately dealt with: the semantics of nested monitor calls; the various ways of defining the meaning of WAIT; priority scheduling; handling of timeouts, aborts and other exceptional conditions; interactions with process creation and destruction; monitoring large numbers of small objects. These problems are addressed by the facilities described here for concurrent programming in Mesa. Experience with several substantial applications gives us some confidence in the validity of our solutions.

A copy is held

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How it got here

How it got hereimport via bibtex
Added2026-08-09 00:00 UTC
Approved bya person 2026-08-22 10:50 UTC

Filed under

cacm what-a-process-may-share

Cite it as

@article{lampson1980experience,
  title        = {Experience with processes and monitors in Mesa},
  author       = {Butler W. Lampson and David D. Redell},
  year         = {1980},
  journal      = {Communications of the ACM},
  volume       = {23},
  number       = {2},
  pages        = {105--117},
  publisher    = {Association for Computing Machinery},
  doi          = {10.1145/358818.358824},
}

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