Path expressions (PEs) offer a declarative way to specify synchronization constraints in concurrent programs, but have largely fallen out of favor due to concerns over limited expressiveness, runtime overhead, and poor integration with contemporary languages. In this work, we revisit PEs and argue for their renewed relevance as reusable synchronization patterns. We present a compiler-assisted approach that integrates PEs into C++ using AspectC++, enabling non-invasive synchronization of existing code. Our prototype demonstrates practical integration on a ring buffer and evaluates performance in a real-world concurrency scenario using MySQL's myisamchk utility. Results show that PE-based synchronization can be both expressive and efficient, performing comparably to traditional mechanisms in many cases. While challenges remain particularly around runtime adaptability and scaling under contention, our findings suggest that PEs deserve reconsideration as a practical tool for building reliable, maintainable concurrent software.

Certification on a component level is highly beneficial in industrial automation because it allows for independent verification and updates without compromising the reliability of the overall system. Containerization technologies naturally address this demand by providing isolation between software modules. In particular, WebAssembly-based (Wasm) containerization is gaining popularity in industrial automation due to its inherent advantages, including cross-platform interoperability and secure execution of untrusted third-party code. However, Wasm’s strict sandboxing poses a significant limitation as it severely limits interaction with hardware devices, making it difficult to interface with sensors and actuators. This is a substantial barrier to adoption in industrial automation, where real-time and low-level hardware interactions are critical. To address this challenge, we present Wasm-IO , a framework designed to facilitate peripheral Input/Output (I/O) operations within WebAssembly (Wasm) containers. Wasm-IO allows the development of isolated device drivers in Wasm, explicitly moving hardware interaction to the container level. Our architectural approach facilitates containers with hardware interaction to be independently certified, updated, and maintained without adversely affecting each other. This article elucidates foundational methodologies and practical implementations supporting synchronous and asynchronous I/O operations and methods for embedding platform-independent peripheral configurations within Wasm binaries. Additionally, we present an extended priority model enabling interrupt handling in Wasm while maintaining temporal isolation. Our evaluation demonstrates that Wasm-IO significantly reduces latency and overhead compared to existing methods and traditional user-level driver implementations, effectively addressing certification and functional requirements critical to industrial automation systems.

For fine-grained synchronization of application and kernel threads, the Linux kernel provides a multitude of different locking mechanisms that are being used on various individually locked data structures. Understanding which locks are required in which order for a particular member variable of a kernel data structure has become truly difficult, even for Linux-kernel experts themselves.