Communicating sequential processes

What Hacker News says

1. madsohmMar 2026
   I wrote both my master thesis and PhD on Hoare's Communicating Sequential Processes. I really enjoyed it's simplicity, expandability, and was always amazed that it inspired and influenced language constructs in Go, Erlang, occam and the likes.
   thread
2. tekbogJul 2025
   There's a great old book on this if someone wants to check it: Communicating Sequential Processes. From Hoare. Go channels and the concurrent approach was inspired on this.

   I also wrote a blog post a while back when I did a talk at work, it's Go focused but still worth the read I think.

   [0] https://bognov.tech/communicating-sequential-processes-in-go...

   thread
3. jgrahamcJan 2024
   I studied at Oxford when Hoare was the lead of the Programming Research Group. We did a lot of CSP stuff and my entire DPhil is CSP and occam. I would recommend reading the CSP book [1] if you really want to know about CSP.

   [1] http://www.usingcsp.com/cspbook.pdf

   thread
4. segmondyDec 2023
   if you don't get anything out of this and don't know Hoare's work, go read CSP - http://www.usingcsp.com/cspbook.pdf
   thread
5. verdvermMay 2022
   The original paper "Communicating Sequential Processes" by Tony Hoare is a good read

   https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~crary/819-f09/Hoare78.pdf

   Both Erlang and Go use this model. As @duped stated, Rust uses a different model

   thread
6. paskozdilarMay 2022
   You're on a right track - the most useful application of concurrency nowdays is I/O, because of the order-of-magnitude larger latency than CPU.

   However, concurrency is much more than IO. Concurrency can be best defined as a lack of ordering of computation. For example, you want to compute A, B, C and their values are independent of each other, the order you compute them does not matter - that is concurrency. If your language has means of expressing "compute these things, i dont care about the order", then your language supports concurrency.

   I suggest reading Communicating Sequential Processes by Tony Hoare. It is a very influential work on concurrency - and the proof of its influence is the design of the Go programming language.

   Show morethread