Article

Type-safe distributed programming for OCaml

Authors:

Rok StrnišaAuthors Info & Claims

ML '06: Proceedings of the 2006 workshop on ML

Pages 20 - 31

https://doi.org/10.1145/1159876.1159881

Published: 16 September 2006 Publication History

Abstract

Existing ML-like languages guarantee type-safety, ensuring memory safety and protecting the invariants of abstract types, but only within single executions of single programs. Distributed programming is becoming ever more important, and should benefit even more from such guarantees. In previous work on theoretical calculi and the Acute prototype language we outlined techniques to provide them for simple languages.In this paper we put these ideas into practice, describing the HashCaml extension to the OCaml bytecode compiler, which supports type-safe and abstraction-safe marshalling, together with related naming constructs. Our contribution is threefold: (1) We show how to define globally meaningful runtime type names for key OCaml type constructs that were not covered in our previous work, dealing with the generativity issues involved: user-defined variant and record types, substructures, functors, arbitrary ascription, separate compilation, and external C functions. (2) We support marshalling within polymorphic functions by type-passing, requiring us to build compositional runtime type names and revisit the OCaml relaxed value restriction. We show that with typed marshalling one must fall back to the SML97 value restriction. (3) We show how the above can be implemented with reasonable performance as an unintrusive modification to the existing OCaml language, implementation, and standard libraries. An alpha release of HashCaml, capable of bootstrapping itself, is available, along with an example type-safe distributed communication library written in the language.

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Cited By

HALLER PMILLER HMÜLLER N(2018)A programming model and foundation for lineage-based distributed computationJournal of Functional Programming10.1017/S095679681800003528Online publication date: 12-Mar-2018
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0956796818000035
Henry GMauny MChailloux EManoury P(2012)Typing unmarshalling without marshalling typesACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/2398856.236456947:9(287-298)Online publication date: 9-Sep-2012
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2398856.2364569
Henry GMauny MChailloux EManoury PThiemann PFindler R(2012)Typing unmarshalling without marshalling typesProceedings of the 17th ACM SIGPLAN international conference on Functional programming10.1145/2364527.2364569(287-298)Online publication date: 9-Sep-2012
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2364527.2364569
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Type-safe distributed programming for OCaml
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. Formal language definitions
    2. General programming languages
      1. Language features
2. Theory of computation
  1. Formal languages and automata theory

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cover image ACM Conferences

ML '06: Proceedings of the 2006 workshop on ML

September 2006

102 pages

ISBN:1595934839

DOI:10.1145/1159876

Program Chairs:
Andrew Kennedy
Microsoft Research Cambridge
,
François Pottier
INRIA Rocquencourt, Paris

Copyright © 2006 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 16 September 2006

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September 16, 2006

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Overall Acceptance Rate 6 of 11 submissions, 55%

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Cited By

HALLER PMILLER HMÜLLER N(2018)A programming model and foundation for lineage-based distributed computationJournal of Functional Programming10.1017/S095679681800003528Online publication date: 12-Mar-2018
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0956796818000035
Henry GMauny MChailloux EManoury P(2012)Typing unmarshalling without marshalling typesACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/2398856.236456947:9(287-298)Online publication date: 9-Sep-2012
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2398856.2364569
Henry GMauny MChailloux EManoury PThiemann PFindler R(2012)Typing unmarshalling without marshalling typesProceedings of the 17th ACM SIGPLAN international conference on Functional programming10.1145/2364527.2364569(287-298)Online publication date: 9-Sep-2012
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2364527.2364569
Wojciechowski P(2011)Typed first-class communication channels and mobility for concurrent scripting languagesProceedings of the 4th international conference on Software Language Engineering10.1007/978-3-642-28830-2_22(378-387)Online publication date: 3-Jul-2011
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/978-3-642-28830-2_22
Sewell PWojciechowski PUnyapoth A(2010)Nomadic pictACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems10.1145/1734206.173420932:4(1-63)Online publication date: 22-Apr-2010
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1734206.1734209
Corin RDeniélou PFournet CBhargavan KLeifer J(2008)A secure compiler for session abstractionsJournal of Computer Security10.5555/1454415.145441916:5(573-636)Online publication date: 1-Dec-2008
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/1454415.1454419
Sewell PStoyle GHicks MBierman GWansbrough K(2008)Dynamic rebinding for marshalling and update, via redex-time and destruct-time reductionJournal of Functional Programming10.1017/S095679680700660018:4(437-502)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2008
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1017/S0956796807006600
Corin RDeniélou P(2008)A Protocol Compiler for Secure Sessions in MLTrustworthy Global Computing10.1007/978-3-540-78663-4_19(276-293)Online publication date: 2008
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-78663-4_19
Corin RDeniélou P(2007)A protocol compiler for secure sessions in MLProceedings of the 3rd conference on Trustworthy global computing10.5555/1793574.1793595(276-293)Online publication date: 5-Nov-2007
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/1793574.1793595
Yallop JRusso CDreyer D(2007)Practical generic programming in OCamlProceedings of the 2007 workshop on Workshop on ML10.1145/1292535.1292548(83-94)Online publication date: 2-Oct-2007
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1292535.1292548
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