% ====================================================================== \chapter{Introduction} % ====================================================================== This proposal provides a minimal concurrency API that is simple, efficient and can be reused to build higher-level features. The simplest possible concurrency system is a thread and a lock but this low-level approach is hard to master. An easier approach for users is to support higher-level constructs as the basis of the concurrency, in \CFA. Indeed, for highly productive parallel programming, high-level approaches are much more popular~\cite{HPP:Study}. Examples are task based, message passing and implicit threading. Therefore a high-level approach is adapted in \CFA There are actually two problems that need to be solved in the design of concurrency for a programming language: which concurrency and which parallelism tools are available to the users. While these two concepts are often combined, they are in fact distinct concepts that require different tools~\cite{Buhr05a}. Concurrency tools need to handle mutual exclusion and synchronization, while parallelism tools are about performance, cost and resource utilization.