research-article

Chocola: integrating futures, actors, and transactions

Authors:

Janwillem Swalens,

Joeri De Koster,

Wolfgang De MeuterAuthors Info & Claims

AGERE 2018: Proceedings of the 8th ACM SIGPLAN International Workshop on Programming Based on Actors, Agents, and Decentralized Control

Pages 33 - 43

https://doi.org/10.1145/3281366.3281373

Published: 05 November 2018 Publication History

Abstract

Developers often combine different concurrency models in a single program, in each part of the program using the model that fits best. Many programming languages, such as Clojure, Scala, and Haskell, cater to this need by supporting different concurrency models. However, they are often combined in an ad hoc way and the semantics of the combination is not always well defined.

This paper studies the combination of three concurrency models: futures, actors, and transactions. We show that a naive combination of these models invalidates the guarantees they normally provide, thereby breaking the assumptions of developers. Hence, we present Chocola: a unified framework of futures, actors, and transactions that maintains the guarantees of all models wherever possible, even when they are combined. We present the semantics of this model and its implementation in Clojure, and have evaluated its performance and expressivity using three benchmark applications.

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Cited By

D. Jardim AOliveira KJ. Cardoso DDi Domenico DR. Du Bois AH. Cavalheiro G(2021)An extension for Transactional Memory in OpenMPProceedings of the 25th Brazilian Symposium on Programming Languages10.1145/3475061.3475089(58-65)Online publication date: 27-Sep-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3475061.3475089
Zeng JIssa SRomano PRodrigues LHaridi SLee JPetrank E(2021)Investigating the semantics of futures in transactional memory systemsProceedings of the 26th ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming10.1145/3437801.3441594(16-30)Online publication date: 17-Feb-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3437801.3441594
Sang BEugster PPetri GRavi SRoman P(2020)Scalable and serializable networked multi-actor programmingProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/34282664:OOPSLA(1-30)Online publication date: 13-Nov-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3428266
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Chocola: integrating futures, actors, and transactions
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. General programming languages
      1. Language features
        Concurrent programming structures
      2. Language types
        Concurrent programming languages
        Multiparadigm languages
        Parallel programming languages

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cover image ACM Conferences

AGERE 2018: Proceedings of the 8th ACM SIGPLAN International Workshop on Programming Based on Actors, Agents, and Decentralized Control

November 2018

71 pages

ISBN:9781450360661

DOI:10.1145/3281366

Copyright © 2018 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 the author(s) 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: 05 November 2018

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SPLASH '18

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SPLASH '18: Conference on Systems, Programming, Languages, and Applications: Software for Humanity

November 5, 2018

MA, Boston, USA

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Overall Acceptance Rate 19 of 35 submissions, 54%

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Cited By

D. Jardim AOliveira KJ. Cardoso DDi Domenico DR. Du Bois AH. Cavalheiro G(2021)An extension for Transactional Memory in OpenMPProceedings of the 25th Brazilian Symposium on Programming Languages10.1145/3475061.3475089(58-65)Online publication date: 27-Sep-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3475061.3475089
Zeng JIssa SRomano PRodrigues LHaridi SLee JPetrank E(2021)Investigating the semantics of futures in transactional memory systemsProceedings of the 26th ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming10.1145/3437801.3441594(16-30)Online publication date: 17-Feb-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3437801.3441594
Sang BEugster PPetri GRavi SRoman P(2020)Scalable and serializable networked multi-actor programmingProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/34282664:OOPSLA(1-30)Online publication date: 13-Nov-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3428266
Rinaldi LTorquati MMencagli GDanelutto MCastegren EDe Koster JSchmidt T(2020)High-throughput stream processing with actorsProceedings of the 10th ACM SIGPLAN International Workshop on Programming Based on Actors, Agents, and Decentralized Control10.1145/3427760.3428338(1-10)Online publication date: 17-Nov-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3427760.3428338

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