research-article

Transactional actors: communication in transactions

Authors:

Janwillem Swalens,

Joeri De Koster, and

Wolfgang De MeuterAuthors Info & Claims

SEPS 2017: Proceedings of the 4th ACM SIGPLAN International Workshop on Software Engineering for Parallel Systems

October 2017

Pages 31 - 41

https://doi.org/10.1145/3141865.3141866

Published: 23 October 2017 Publication History

Abstract

Developers often require different concurrency models to fit the various concurrency needs of the different parts of their applications. Many programming languages, such as Clojure, Scala, and Haskell, cater to this need by incorporating different concurrency models. It has been shown that, in practice, developers often combine these concurrency models. However, they are often combined in an ad hoc way and the semantics of the combination is not always well-defined. The starting hypothesis of this paper is that different concurrency models need to be carefully integrated such that the properties of each individual model are still maintained.

This paper proposes one such combination, namely the combination of the actor model and software transactional memory. In this paper we show that, while both individual models offer strong safety guarantees, these guarantees are no longer valid when they are combined. The main contribution of this paper is a novel hybrid concurrency model called transactional actors that combines both models while preserving their guarantees. This paper also presents an implementation in Clojure and an experimental evaluation of the performance of the transactional actor model.

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Cited By

Vidal GHong JPark J(2024)An Asynchronous Scheme for Rollback Recovery in Message-Passing Concurrent Programming LanguagesProceedings of the 39th ACM/SIGAPP Symposium on Applied Computing10.1145/3605098.3636051(1132-1139)Online publication date: 8-Apr-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3605098.3636051
Castegren EWrigstad T(2024)Encore: CodaActive Object Languages: Current Research Trends10.1007/978-3-031-51060-1_3(59-91)Online publication date: 29-Jan-2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-51060-1_3
Vidal G(2023)From Reversible Computation to Checkpoint-Based Rollback Recovery for Message-Passing Concurrent ProgramsFormal Aspects of Component Software10.1007/978-3-031-52183-6_6(103-123)Online publication date: 26-Oct-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/978-3-031-52183-6_6
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Transactional actors: communication in transactions
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. General programming languages
      1. Language types
        Concurrent programming languages
        Parallel programming languages

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cover image ACM Conferences

SEPS 2017: Proceedings of the 4th ACM SIGPLAN International Workshop on Software Engineering for Parallel Systems

October 2017

47 pages

ISBN:9781450355179

DOI:10.1145/3141865

Copyright © 2017 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: 23 October 2017

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SPLASH '17: Conference on Systems, Programming, Languages, and Applications: Software for Humanity

October 23, 2017

BC, Vancouver, Canada

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Cited By

Vidal GHong JPark J(2024)An Asynchronous Scheme for Rollback Recovery in Message-Passing Concurrent Programming LanguagesProceedings of the 39th ACM/SIGAPP Symposium on Applied Computing10.1145/3605098.3636051(1132-1139)Online publication date: 8-Apr-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3605098.3636051
Castegren EWrigstad T(2024)Encore: CodaActive Object Languages: Current Research Trends10.1007/978-3-031-51060-1_3(59-91)Online publication date: 29-Jan-2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-51060-1_3
Vidal G(2023)From Reversible Computation to Checkpoint-Based Rollback Recovery for Message-Passing Concurrent ProgramsFormal Aspects of Component Software10.1007/978-3-031-52183-6_6(103-123)Online publication date: 26-Oct-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/978-3-031-52183-6_6
Swalens JKoster JMeuter W(2021)ChocolaACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems10.1145/342720142:4(1-56)Online publication date: 27-Jan-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3427201
Sakurai KShimizu TBergenti FCastegren EDe Koster JFranco J(2019)Actor-based incremental tree data processing for large-scale machine learning applicationsProceedings of the 9th ACM SIGPLAN International Workshop on Programming Based on Actors, Agents, and Decentralized Control10.1145/3358499.3361220(1-10)Online publication date: 22-Oct-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3358499.3361220
Swalens JDe Koster JDe Meuter WDe Koster JBergenti FFranco J(2018)Chocola: integrating futures, actors, and transactionsProceedings of the 8th ACM SIGPLAN International Workshop on Programming Based on Actors, Agents, and Decentralized Control10.1145/3281366.3281373(33-43)Online publication date: 5-Nov-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3281366.3281373
Modas ACasale-Brunet SStewart RBezati EAhmad JMattavelli M(2018)Shared-variable Synchronization Approaches for Dynamic Data Flow Programs2018 IEEE International Workshop on Signal Processing Systems (SiPS)10.1109/SiPS.2018.8598431(263-268)Online publication date: Oct-2018
https://doi.org/10.1109/SiPS.2018.8598431

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