Who is Accountable for Asynchronous Exceptions?

Abstract

Abstract-Large parts of today's software systems are devoted to detecting and recovering from failures, making exception handling a critical issue in software development. Concurrent software complicates this issue: most concurrent programming languages require a mechanism to deal with asynchronous exceptions, but because of the diverse design choices underlying each language, no approach fits all situations. We introduce a classification of possible approaches to guide the development of asynchronous exception mechanisms, and we show its applicability by deriving a sound and comprehensible mechanism for SCOOP, an object-oriented programming model for concurrency. We describe the key idea of the mechanism using the accountability framework, which precisely defines the obligations of client and supplier regarding the reporting of exceptions. The framework not only provides the necessary intuition to apply the mechanism correctly, it is also useful to comprehend other approaches.

Unobtrusive Asynchronous Exception Handling with Standard Java Try/Catch Blocks

“…Fan et al discuss the existing capacities for enhancing exception handling in OpenMP, and propose local and global cancellation directives for terminating either the thread that has encountered an exception, or the entire group of threads within parallel regions [13]. Morandi and Nanz suggest protocols for communication between asynchronous operations of a system for propagating and handling exceptions [19]. Likewise, Issarny studies cooperative exception handling, in which global messages are sent by tasks that incur exceptions in order to inform their dependents not to wait any longer and proceed execution [14].…”

A semantics comparison workbench for a concurrent, asynchronous, distributed programming language

“…We are currently working on extending Scoop-Gts to cover some more advanced and esoteric features of Scoop and D-Scoop (e.g. exception handling [MNM12], compensation [SPM16], passive handlers [MNM14]), and plan to extend the benchmark set to produce a comprehensive conformance test suite for the Scoop family of semantics. We are continuing to look for ways of refactoring Scoop-Gts to improve performance and broaden the class of programs it can handle practically, noting the impact that the shapes of rules and control programs can have on Groove's running time [ZR14].…”