Programming languages for distributed computing systems

Abstract

When distributed systems first appeared, they were programmed in traditional sequential languages, usually with the addition of a few library procedures for sending and receiving messages. As distributed applications became more commonplace and more sophisticated, this ad hoc approach became less satisfactory. Researchers all over the world began designing new programming languages specifically for implementing distributed applications. These languages and their history, their underlying principles, their design, and their use are the subject of this paper.We begin by giving our view of what a distributed system is, illustrating with examples to avoid confusion on this important and controversial point. We then describe the three main characteristics that distinguish distributed programming languages from traditional sequential languages, namely, how they deal with parallelism, communication, and partial failures. Finally, we discuss 15 representative distributed languages to give the flavor of each. These examples include languages based on message passing, rendezvous, remote procedure call, objects, and atomic transactions, as well as functional languages, logic languages, and distributed data structure languages. The paper concludes with a comprehensive bibliography listing over 200 papers on nearly 100 distributed programming languages.

Distributed programming with shared data

“…Of the many programming languages for distributed systems that are around today [Bal et al 1988], several recent ones present a computational model based on sharing data. More significant, novel programming styles are emerging.…”

Separating Program Semantics From Deployment

“…Cells that communicate frequently may be mapped onto processors that are physically close to reduce communication time. Being familiar with the nature of the problem that is solved by the program, programmer may map cells onto processors considering the specific nature of the problem and the characteristics of the individual processors (Bal et al, 1989).…”

Systematic Composition of Distributed Objects: Processes and Sessions

“…Research has yielded many theories, methods and tools to help application developers use distributed systems [19], distributed languages [24] and distributed algorithms [1,25]. Our programming model and theories of structured composition build on this research and recent work in formal methods [2,3,4,5,7,18].…”