Object-oriented programming and parallelism: Introduction

Initially, object-orientation and parallelism originated and developed as separate and relatively independent areas. During the last decade, however, more and more researchers were attracted by the benefits from a potential marriage of the two powerful paradigms. Numerous research projects and an increasing number of practical applications were aimed at different forms of amalgamation of parallelism with object-orientation. As elaborated in this paper, it has been realized that parallelism is an inherently needed enhancement for the traditional object-oriented programming (OOP) paradigm, and that object-orientation can add significant flexibility to the parallel programming paradigm.