Global abstraction-safe marshalling with hash types

Leifer, James J.; Peskine, Gilles; Sewell, Peter; Wansbrough, Keith

doi:10.1145/944746.944714

Cited by 11 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 27 publications

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“…Relationship to previous work ( §11, §12) Acute builds on previous work, in which we introduced new-bound type names for abstract types [Sew01], hash-generated type names [LPSW03], and controlled dynamic rebinding in a lambda-calculus [BHS + 03], all in simple variants for for small calculi.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Acute: High-level programming language design for distributed computation

Sewell¹,

Leifer

Wansbrough³

et al. 2007

J. Funct. Prog.

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Existing languages provide good support for typeful programming of standalone programs. In a distributed system, however, there may be interaction between multiple instances of many distinct programs, sharing some (but not necessarily all) of their module structure, and with some instances rebuilt with new versions of certain modules as time goes on. In this paper we discuss programminglanguage support for such systems, focussing on their typing and naming issues.We describe an experimental language, Acute, which extends an ML core to support distributed development, deployment, and execution, allowing type-safe interaction between separately-built programs. The main features are: (1) type-safe marshalling of arbitrary values; (2) type names that are generated (freshly and by hashing) to ensure that type equality tests suffice to protect the invariants of abstract types, across the entire distributed system; (3) expression-level names generated to ensure that name equality tests suffice for type-safety of associated values, e.g. values carried on named channels; (4) controlled dynamic rebinding of marshalled values to local resources; and (5) thunkification of threads and mutexes to support computation mobility.These features are a large part of what is needed for typeful distributed programming. They are a relatively lightweight extension of ML, should be efficiently implementable, and are expressive enough to enable a wide variety of distributed infrastructure layers to be written as simple library code above the byte-string network and persistent store APIs. This disentangles the language runtime from communication intricacies. This paper highlights the main design choices in Acute. It is supported by a full language definition (of typing, compilation, and operational semantics), by a prototype implementation, and by example distribution libraries.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In [Sew01,LPSW03] we proposed a strong coercion with! to do this, and Acute includes a variant thereof.…”

Section: Breaking Abstractionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Acute: High-level programming language design for distributed computation

Sewell¹,

Leifer

Wansbrough³

et al. 2007

J. Funct. Prog.

Self Cite

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“…For instance, Bierman et al [BHS + 03] proposed abstraction-safe marshalling and unmarshalling (or rebinding) values between separate programs in the λ-calculus; see also the Acute programming language [LPSW03]. An extension of Smalltalk with dynamic method redefinition in the scope of classboxes is described in [BDW03]; the dynamic rebinding feature is used here to support software evolution.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Class-Based Object Calculus of Dynamic Binding: Reduction and Properties

Wojciechowski

2006

Software Composition

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Abstract. To be able to compose and decompose software components at run time, some form of dynamic rebinding between components (or objects) is needed. In this paper, we identify basic properties of dynamic object (re)binding, and propose a class-based object calculus that gives precise meaning to these properties. We also define two example semantic properties that are characteristic for many concurrent programs with low-level bind/unbind operations. Our calculus has a built-in construct atomic that can be used to implement one of the semantic properties.

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“…As discussed in the introduction, sealing was first proposed by Morris [18,19] and has been revisited in more recent work on extending the "scope" (in both informal and technical senses) of type abstraction in various forms [7,12,26,28].…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

A bisimulation for dynamic sealing

Sumii

Pierce

2004

Proceedings of the 31st ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages

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We define λ seal , an untyped call-by-value λ-calculus with primitives for protecting abstract data by sealing, and develop a bisimulation proof method that is sound and complete with respect to contextual equivalence. This provides a formal basis for reasoning about data abstraction in open, dynamic settings where static techniques such as type abstraction and logical relations are not applicable.

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Global abstraction-safe marshalling with hash types

Cited by 11 publications

References 27 publications

Acute: High-level programming language design for distributed computation

Acute: High-level programming language design for distributed computation

A Class-Based Object Calculus of Dynamic Binding: Reduction and Properties

A bisimulation for dynamic sealing

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