Last Friday, I defended my PhD dissertation. Finally, after 4 years and a bit, I am done. Finally. I am very grateful to all the people supporting me along the way and of course to my colleagues for their help.

My work focused on how to build VMs with support for all kind of different concurrent programming abstractions. Since you don’t want to put them into a VM just one by one, I was looking for a unifying substrate that’s up to the task. Below, you’ll find the abstract as well as the slides.

In addition to the thesis text itself, the implementations and tools are available. Please see the project page for more details.

Abstract

During the past decade, software developers widely adopted JVM and CLI as multi-language virtual machines (VMs). At the same time, the multicore revolution burdened developers with increasing complexity. Language implementers devised a wide range of concurrent and parallel programming concepts to address this complexity but struggle to build these concepts on top of common multi-language VMs. Missing support in these VMs leads to tradeoffs between implementation simplicity, correctly implemented language semantics, and performance guarantees.

Departing from the traditional distinction between concurrency and parallelism, this dissertation finds that parallel programming concepts benefit from performance-related VM support, while concurrent programming concepts benefit from VM support that guarantees correct semantics in the presence of reflection, mutable state, and interaction with other languages and libraries.

Focusing on these concurrent programming concepts, this dissertation finds that a VM needs to provide mechanisms for managed state, managed execution, ownership, and controlled enforcement. Based on these requirements, this dissertation proposes an ownership-based metaobject protocol (OMOP) to build novel multi-language VMs with proper concurrent programming support.

This dissertation demonstrates the OMOP’s benefits by building concurrent programming concepts such as agents, software transactional memory, actors, active objects, and communicating sequential processes on top of the OMOP. The performance evaluation shows that OMOP-based implementations of concurrent programming concepts can reach performance on par with that of their conventionally implemented counterparts if the OMOP is supported by the VM.

To conclude, the OMOP proposed in this dissertation provides a unifying and minimal substrate to support concurrent programming on top of multi-language VMs. The OMOP enables language implementers to correctly implement language semantics, while simultaneously enabling VMs to provide efficient implementations.

  • Supporting Concurrency Abstractions in High-level Language Virtual Machines, Stefan Marr. Software Languages Lab, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Pleinlaan 2, B-1050 Brussels, Belgium, PhD Dissertation, January 2013. ISBN 978-90-5718-256-3.
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  • BibTex: BibSonomy

Slides