From Atomic variables to data-centric concurrency control

The mainstream use of concurrent programming is bound to the provision of constructs that abstract details intrinsic to concurrency, while ensuring safety and liveness properties. Several control-centric approaches meet these requirements but decentralise concurrency management, hindering reasoning. The alternative data-centric approach promotes local rather than distributed reasoning, however it is a fairly new approach embraced only by Atomic Sets [4, 8], a rather complex model that does not guarantee progress in all scenarios. In this paper we propose a simple data-centric concurrency control model that builds only on the notion of atomic variable. We informally present the model and its properties, as well as a prototype implementation that we used to compare our approach against the aforementioned Atomic Sets and control-centred approaches in general.