Help!

A fundamental challenge in designing concurrent data structures is obtaining efficient wait-free implementations, in which each operation completes regardless of the behavior of other operations in the system. The most common paradigm for guaranteeing wait- freedom is to employ a helping mechanism, in which, intuitively, fast processes help slow processes complete their operations. Curiously, despite its abundant use, to date, helping has not been formally defined nor was its necessity rigorously studied. In this paper we initiate a rigorous study of the interaction between wait-freedom and helping. We start with presenting a formal definition of help, capturing the intuition of one thread helping an- other to make progress. Next, we present families of object types for which help is necessary in order to obtain wait-freedom. In other words, we prove that for some types there are no linearizable wait-free help-free implementations. In contrast, we show that other, simple types, can be implemented in a linearizable wait-free manner without employing help. Finally, we provide a universal strong primitive for implementing wait-free data structures without using help. Specifically, given a wait-free help-free fetch&cons ob- ject, one can implement any type in a wait-free help-free manner.