Linguistic symbiosis between actors and threads

Abstract

Abstract. We describe a linguistic symbiosis between AmbientTalk, a flexible, domain-specific language for writing distributed programs and Java, a conventional object-oriented language. This symbiosis allows concerns related to distribution (service discovery, asynchronous communication, failure handling) to be handled in the domain-specific language, while still enabling the reuse of existing software components written in a conventional language. The symbiosis is novel in the sense that a mapping is defined between the concurrency models of both languages. AmbientTalk employs an inherently event-driven model based on actors, while conventional object-oriented languages employ a concurrency model based on threads. The contribution of this paper is a linguistic symbiosis which ensures that the invariants of the event-driven concurrency model are not violated by engaging in symbiosis with multithreaded programs.

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“…This mapping has been reported on earlier [8] but we extend the previously discussed mapping here with more elaborate support for futures. In the following section, we briefly summarise the core problem solved by our contribution.…”

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“…The linguistic symbiosis model∥ has been previously used to bridge two languages (e.g. SOUL and Smalltalk 14, AmbientTalk and Java 15). It adheres to the following principles:…”