Writing concurrent code that is both correct and efficient is notoriously difficult. Thus, programmers often prefer to use synchronization abstractions, which render code simpler and easier to reason about. Despite a wealth of work on this topic, there is still a gap between the rich semantics provided by synchronization abstractions in modern programming languages—specifically, fair FIFO ordering of synchronization requests and support for abortable operations—and frameworks for implementing it correctly and efficiently. Supporting such semantics is critical given the rising popularity of constructs for asynchronous programming, such as coroutines, which abort frequently and are cheaper to suspend and resume compared to native threads. This paper introduces a new framework called CancellableQueueSynchronizer (CQS), which enables simple yet efficient implementations of a wide range of fair and abortable synchronization primitives: mutexes, semaphores, barriers, count-down latches, and blocking pools. Our main contribution is algorithmic, as implementing both fairness and abortability efficiently at this level of generality is non-trivial. Importantly, all our algorithms, including the CQS framework and the primitives built on top of it, come with formal proofs in the Iris framework for Coq for many of their properties. These proofs are modular, so it is easy to show correctness for new primitives implemented on top of CQS. From a practical perspective, implementation of CQS for native threads on the JVM improves throughput by up to two orders of magnitude over Java’s AbstractQueuedSynchronizer, the only practical abstraction offering similar semantics. Further, we successfully integrated CQS as a core component of the popular Kotlin Coroutines library, validating the framework’s practical impact and expressiveness in a real-world environment. In sum, CancellableQueueSynchronizer is the first framework to combine expressiveness with formal guarantees and solid practical performance. Our approach should be extensible to other languages and families of synchronization primitives.

Writing concurrent code that is both correct and efficient is notoriously difficult: thus, programmers often prefer to use synchronization abstractions, which render code simpler and easier to reason about. Despite a wealth of work on this topic, there is still a gap between the rich semantics provided by synchronization abstractions in modern programming languages-specifically, fair FIFO ordering of synchronization requests and support for abortable operations-and frameworks for implementing such semantics correctly and efficiently. Supporting such semantics is critical given the rising popularity of constructs for asynchronous programming, such as coroutines, which abort frequently, and should be cheaper to suspend and resume compared to native threads. We introduce a new framework called the CancellableQueueSynchronizer (CQS), which enables efficient fair and abortable implementations of fundamental synchronization primitives such as mutexes, semaphores, barriers, count-down-latches, and blocking pools. Our first contribution is algorithmic, as implementing both fairness and abortability efficiently at this level of generality is non-trivial. Importantly, all our algorithms come with formal proofs in the Iris framework for Coq. These proofs are modular, so it is easy to prove correctness for new primitives implemented on top of CQS. To validate practical impact, we integrated CQS into the Kotlin Coroutines library. Compared against Java's AbstractQueuedSynchronizer, the only practical abstraction to provide similar semantics, CQS shows significant improvements across all benchmarks, of up to two orders of magnitude. In sum, CQS is the first framework to combine expressiveness with formal guarantees and strong practical performance, and should be extensible to other languages and other families of synchronization primitives.