A Type-and-Effect System for Shared Memory, Concurrent Implicit Invocation Systems

Abstract

<p>Driven by the need to utilize multicore platforms, recent language designs aim to bring the concurrency advantages of events in distributed publish-subscribe systems to sequential OO programs that utilize the implicit invocation (II) design style. These proposals face two challenges. First, unlike the publish-subscribe paradigm where publisher and subscriber typically don't share state, communicating via shared state is common in II programs. Second, type-and-effect systems that are generally designed for statically reasoning about a program's execution are often too conservative to handle II that typically entails a virtual method invocation on zero or more dynamically registered handlers. To solve these problems, we present a novel hybrid type-and-effect system for exposing concurrency in programs that use II mechanisms. This type-and-effect system provides deadlock and data race freedom in such usage of II mechanisms. We have also implemented this type-and-effect system. An initial study shows its scalability benefits and acceptable costs.</p>