A Smooth Concurrency Revolution with Free Objects

In this paper, the author propose viewing a program as a collection of "free" objects, each of which has its own thread of control and executes its operations within atomic transactions. Such objects would communicate by asynchronous message passing with futures - objects that encapsulate the results of server invocations and let clients retrieve them while hiding the actual state of readiness from the client. Except for the unleashing of newly created free objects, there's no need for specific language constructs other than those already available in 00 languages. After all, C++ has been successful in part because it looked like C, Java has been successful in part because it looked like C++, and C# looks like both. With free objects, the program looks exactly like a traditional OO program, with one exception: certain object creations fork new activity threads and must be distinguished as such. This column discusses how to do that.