ISSUES IN DISTRIBUTED PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES: THE EVOLUTION OF SR (CONCURRENT).

Abstract

This dissertation examines fundamental issues that face the designers of any distributed programming language. It considers how programs are structured, how processes communicate and synchronize, and how hardware failures are represented and handled. We discuss each of these issues and argue for a particular approach based on our application domain: distributed systems (such as distributed operating systems) and distributed user applications. We conclude that a language for such applications should include the following mechanisms: dynamic modules, shared variables (within a module), dynamic processes, synchronous and asynchronous forms of message passing, rendezvous, concurrent invocation, and early reply. We then describe the current SR language, which has evolved considerably based on our experience. SR provides the above mechanisms in a way that is expressive yet simple. SR resolves the tension between expressiveness and simplicity by providing a variety of mechanisms based on only a few underlying concepts. The main language constructs are still resources and operations. Resources encapsulate processes and the variables they share; operations provide the primary mechanism for process interaction. One way in which SR has changed is that both resources and processes are now created dynamically. Another change is that all the common mechanisms for process interaction--local and remote procedure call, rendezvous, dynamic process creation, asynchronous message passing, and semaphores--are now supported by a novel integration of the mechanisms for invoking and servicing operations. Many small and several larger examples illustrate SR's mechanisms and the interplay between them; these examples also demonstrate the language's expressiveness and flexibility. We then describe our implementation of SR. The compiler, linker, and run-time support are summarized. We then focus on how the generated code and run-time support interact to provide dynamic resources and to generate and service invocations. We also describe optimizations for certain operations. Measurements of the implementation's size and cost are given. The implementation has been in use since November 1985 and is currently being improved. Finally, we justify SR's syntax and semantics and examine how its mechanisms compare to other approaches to distributed programming. We also discuss how SR balances expressiveness, simplicity, and efficiency.