Programming concurrency and synchronisation in Actel

This paper introduces mechanisms for exploiting concurrency and synchronisation in Actel: a concurrent object based language. It focuses on issues of combining parallelism with object orientation, performance, and synchronisation. Actel offers several mechanisms such as a new mode of message passing called 'semi-reference' to achieve an efficient inter-object concurrency. Parallel functions and parallel compound statements are provided to exploit concurrency inside an object at several levels without recourse to explicit synchronisation. Implicit synchronisation is obtained through future variables.