I am working at the
Towards Meta-Level Engineering and Tooling for Complex Concurrent Systems
Last December, we got a research project proposal accepted for a collaboration between the Software Languages Lab in Brussels and the Institute for System Software here in Linz. Together, we will be working on tooling for complex concurrent systems. And with that I mean systems that use multiple concurrency models in combination to solve different problems, each with the appropriate abstraction. I have been working on these issues already for a while. Some pointers are available here in an earlier post: Why Is Concurrent Programming Hard? And What Can We Do about It?
End of February, I am going to talk about that a little more at the Arbeitstagung Programmiersprachen in Vienna. Below, you can find an abstract and link to the position paper. There is not a lot of concrete material in yet, but it sketches the problems we will try to address in the years to come.
Abstract
With the widespread use of multicore processors, software becomes more and more diverse in its use of parallel computing resources. To address all application requirements, each with the appropriate abstraction, developers mix and match various concurrency abstractions made available to them via libraries and frameworks. Unfortunately, today’s tools such as debuggers and profilers do not support the diversity of these abstractions. Instead of enabling developers to reason about the high-level programming concepts, they used to express their programs, the tools work only on the library’s implementation level. While this is a common problem also for other libraries and frameworks, the complexity of concurrency exacerbates the issue further, and reasoning on the higher levels of the concurrency abstractions is essential to manage the associated complexity.
In this position paper, we identify open research issues and propose to build tools based on a common meta-level interface to enable developers to reasons about their programs based on the high-level concepts they used to implement them.