A survey of concurrent object-oriented languages

Abstract

SUMMARYDuring the last decade object-oriented programming has grown from marginal influence into widespread acceptance. During the same period, progress in hardware and networking has changed the computing environment from sequential to parallel. Multi-processor workstations and clusters are now quite common.Unnumbered proposals have been made to combine both developments. Always the prime objective has been to provide the advantages of object-oriented software design at the increased power of parallel machines. However, combining both concepts has proven to be notoriously difficult. Depending on the approach, often key characteristics of either the object-oriented paradigm or key performance factors of parallelism are sacrificed, resulting in unsatisfactory languages.This survey first recapitulates well-known characteristics of both the object-oriented paradigm and parallel programming, and then marks out the design space of possible combinations by identifying various interdependencies of key concepts. The design space is then filled with data points: for 111 proposed languages we provide brief characteristics and feature tables. Feature tables, the comprehensive bibliography, and web-addresses might help in identifying open questions and preventing re-inventions.

Incremental Lock Selection for Composite Objects.

“…So many concurrent programming languages and models have emerged in the past three decades. We do not attempt a full survey here-see for instance Briot et al [9] or Philippsen [10] for comprehensive surveys of systems and approaches that integrate concurrency and object-oriented languages. Little of this work has addressed issues of lock distribution and how to select amongst alternative safe locking strategies.…”

Incrementally developing parallel applications with AspectJ

“…These extensions are based on the same primitives, but active and passive objects can coexist in the same application. On these extensions new language constructs are introduced that indicate which objects are active and which calls can be performed asynchronously [11] [17]. These approaches require source code modifications to introduce parallelisation statements, resulting in tangled code, where partition, concurrency and distribution issues are mixed with object definitions.…”

On State Classes and Their Dynamic Semantics

“…According to (Philippsen, 2000) states provide a boundary coordination mechanism (we refer to Sect. 4.2 of (Philippsen, 2000) for a survey of several COOLs with boundary coordination).…”

“…4.2 of (Philippsen, 2000) for a survey of several COOLs with boundary coordination). In particular, the state class construct is related to the actor model (Agha, 1986) and to the behaviour abstraction and behaviour/enable sets proposals (Kafura and Lavender, 1996;Tomlinson and Singh, 1989).…”

“…Various language constructs for expressing object's state abstractions have been proposed in the literature (see, e.g., (Philippsen, 2000) for a survey). We propose state classes, a programming feature that could be added to JAVA-like programming languages.…”