Added Love2D as it is an open source library for Lua that uses channels and uses familiar data structures (stacks) in its channel implementation to simplify its usage.
In computing, a '''channel''' is a model for [[interprocess communication]] and [[synchronization]] via [[message passing]]. A message may be sent over a channel, and another process or thread is able to receive messages sent over a channel it has a [[reference (computer science)|reference]] to, as a [[stream (computing)|stream]]. Different implementations of channels may be buffered or not, and either synchronous or asynchronous.
Channels are fundamental to the [[process calculus]] approach to concurrency, and originated in [[communicating sequential processes]] (CSP), a formal model for concurrency, and has been used in many derived languages, such as [[occam (programming language)|occam]], and [[Limbo programming language]] (via [[Newsqueak]] and the [[Alef programming language]]). They are also used in [[Plan 9 from Bell Labs]]'s libthread, as well as in [[Stackless Python]] and the [[Go (programming language)|Go programming language]].
==Channel implementations==
Channels modeled after the CSP model are inherently [[Synchronization (computer science)|synchronous]]: a process waiting to receive an object from a channel will [[Blocking (computing)|block]] until the object is sent. This is also called [[rendezvous behaviour]].
Typical supported operations are presented below using the example of the [[libthread]] channel API.
* Channel creation of fixed or variable size, returning a [[reference]] or [[Reference (computer science)|handle]] <syntaxhighlight lang="c">Channel* chancreate(int elemsize, int bufsize)</syntaxhighlight>
* sending to a channel <syntaxhighlight lang="c">int chansend(Channel *c, void *v)</syntaxhighlight>
* receiving from a channel <syntaxhighlight lang="c">int chanrecv(Channel *c, void *v)</syntaxhighlight>
