Process-oriented programming is a
programming paradigm
Programming paradigms are a way to classify programming languages based on their features. Languages can be classified into multiple paradigms.
Some paradigms are concerned mainly with implications for the execution model of the language, suc ...
that separates the concerns of data structures and the concurrent processes that act upon them. The data structures in this case are typically persistent, complex, and large scale - the subject of general purpose applications, as opposed to specialized processing of specialized data sets seen in high productivity applications (HPC). The model allows the creation of large scale applications that partially share common data sets. Programs are functionally decomposed into parallel processes that create and act upon logically shared data.
The paradigm was originally invented for parallel computers in the 1980s, especially computers built with
transputer
The transputer is a series of pioneering microprocessors from the 1980s, intended for parallel computing. To support this, each transputer had its own integrated memory and serial communication links to exchange data with other transputers. T ...
microprocessors by
INMOS, or similar architectures.
Occam was an early process-oriented language developed for the Transputer.
Some derivations have evolved from the
message passing
In computer science, message passing is a technique for invoking behavior (i.e., running a program) on a computer. The invoking program sends a message to a process (which may be an actor or object) and relies on that process and its supporting i ...
paradigm of Occam to enable uniform efficiency when porting applications between
distributed memory
In computer science, distributed memory refers to a multiprocessor computer system in which each processor has its own private memory. Computational tasks can only operate on local data, and if remote data are required, the computational task mu ...
and
shared memory
In computer science, shared memory is memory that may be simultaneously accessed by multiple programs with an intent to provide communication among them or avoid redundant copies. Shared memory is an efficient means of passing data between progr ...
parallel computers . The first such derived example appears in the programming language
Ease designed at Yale University
in 1990. Similar models have appeared since in the loose combination of SQL databases and objected oriented languages such as
Java
Java (; id, Jawa, ; jv, ꦗꦮ; su, ) is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea to the north. With a population of 151.6 million people, Java is the world's List ...
, often referred to as object-relational models and widely used in large scale distributed systems today. The paradigm is likely to appear on desktop computers as microprocessors increase the number of processors (
multicore
A multi-core processor is a microprocessor on a single integrated circuit with two or more separate processing units, called cores, each of which reads and executes program instructions. The instructions are ordinary CPU instructions (such a ...
) per chip.
The
Actor model
The actor model in computer science is a mathematical model of concurrent computation that treats ''actor'' as the universal primitive of concurrent computation. In response to a message it receives, an actor can: make local decisions, create more ...
might usefully be described as a specialized kind of process-oriented system in which the message-passing model is restricted to the simple fixed case of one infinite
input queue
In computer science, an input queue is a collection of processes in storage that are waiting to be brought into memory to run a program. Input queues are mainly used in Operating System Scheduling which is a technique for distributing resources ...
per process (i.e. actor), to which any other process can send messages.
See also
*
Communicating process architectures
Communication (from la, communicare, meaning "to share" or "to be in relation with") is usually defined as the transmission of information. The term may also refer to the message communicated through such transmissions or the field of inquir ...
*
Massively parallel processing
Massively parallel is the term for using a large number of computer processors (or separate computers) to simultaneously perform a set of coordinated computations in parallel. GPUs are massively parallel architecture with tens of thousands of t ...
*
Parallel computing
Parallel computing is a type of computation in which many calculations or processes are carried out simultaneously. Large problems can often be divided into smaller ones, which can then be solved at the same time. There are several different fo ...
*
Multi-core
A multi-core processor is a microprocessor on a single integrated circuit with two or more separate processing units, called cores, each of which reads and executes program instructions. The instructions are ordinary CPU instructions (such a ...
*
Actor model
The actor model in computer science is a mathematical model of concurrent computation that treats ''actor'' as the universal primitive of concurrent computation. In response to a message it receives, an actor can: make local decisions, create more ...
References
{{Reflist
External links
Sowders, Matthew, "ProcessJ: A process-oriented programming language" (2011). UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones. Paper 1393. Programming paradigms