Deny capabilities for safe, fast actors

Clebsch, Sylvan; Drossopoulou, Sophia; Blessing, Sebastian; McNeil, Andy

doi:10.1145/2824815.2824816

Cited by 74 publications

(97 citation statements)

References 21 publications

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“…The Encore runtime stack (Fig. 9) is built around the runtime used by the Pony language (PonyRT) [31], which includes an actor library and garbage collection for both active objects (actors) [30] and passive objects [29]. The Encore runtime (EncoreRT) extends the PonyRT with new features such as futures, the ParT abstraction, a task library, and the notion of encore threads (explained below).…”

Section: Encorementioning

confidence: 99%

A Survey of Active Object Languages

et al. 2017

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International audienceTo program parallel systems efficiently and easily, a wide range of programming models have been proposed, each with different choices concerning synchronization and communication between parallel entities. Among them, the actor model is based on loosely coupled parallel entities that communicate by means of asynchronous messages and mailboxes. Some actor languages provide a strong integration with object-oriented concepts; these are often called active object languages. This paper reviews four major actor and active object languages and compares them according to carefully chosen dimensions that cover central aspects of the programming paradigms and their implementation

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Section: Encorementioning

confidence: 99%

A Survey of Active Object Languages

et al. 2017

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“…Figure 3 We now describe how Pony's type system Ð capabilities are attached to types Ð [Clebsch et al 2015;Steed 2016] uses capabilities to constrain behaviours. We distinguish between sendable and non-sendable capabilities.…”

Section: :5mentioning

confidence: 99%

Orca: GC and type system co-design for actor languages

Clebsch

Franco

Drossopoulou

et al. 2017

Proc. ACM Program. Lang.

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Orca is a concurrent and parallel garbage collector for actor programs, which does not require any stop-theworld steps, or synchronisation mechanisms, and which has been designed to support zero-copy message passing and sharing of mutable data. Orca is part of the runtime of the actor-based language Pony. Pony's runtime was co-designed with the Pony language. This co-design allowed us to exploit certain language properties in order to optimise performance of garbage collection. Namely, Orca relies on the absence of race conditions in order to avoid read/write barriers, and it leverages actor message passing for synchronisation among actors. This paper describes Pony, its type system, and the Orca garbage collection algorithm. An evaluation of the performance of Orca suggests that it is fast and scalable for idiomatic workloads.

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“…Existing techniques for achieving actor isolation are often based on restricting aliasing, for example copying all data passed between actors [2], or relying on linear types to transfer ownership of data [3,5,6,10]. Bestowed objects offer an alternative technique which relaxes actor isolation and allows sharing of data without sacrificing sequential reasoning.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Actors without Borders: Amnesty for Imprisoned State

Castegren

Wrigstad

2017

Electron. Proc. Theor. Comput. Sci.

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In concurrent systems, some form of synchronisation is typically needed to achieve data-race freedom, which is important for correctness and safety. In actor-based systems, messages are exchanged concurrently but executed sequentially by the receiving actor. By relying on isolation and non-sharing, an actor can access its own state without fear of data-races, and the internal behavior of an actor can be reasoned about sequentially.However, actor isolation is sometimes too strong to express useful patterns. For example, letting the iterator of a data-collection alias the internal structure of the collection allows a more efficient implementation than if each access requires going through the interface of the collection. With full isolation, in order to maintain sequential reasoning the iterator must be made part of the collection, which bloats the interface of the collection and means that a client must have access to the whole data-collection in order to use the iterator.In this paper, we propose a programming language construct that enables a relaxation of isolation but without sacrificing sequential reasoning. We formalise the mechanism in a simple lambda calculus with actors and passive objects, and show how an actor may leak parts of its internal state while ensuring that any interaction with this data is still synchronised.

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Deny capabilities for safe, fast actors

Cited by 74 publications

References 21 publications

A Survey of Active Object Languages

A Survey of Active Object Languages

Orca: GC and type system co-design for actor languages

Actors without Borders: Amnesty for Imprisoned State

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