Many programming languages, such as Clojure, Scala, and Haskell, support different concurrency models. In practice these models are often combined, however the semantics of the combinations are not always well-defined. In this paper, we study the combination of futures and Software Transactional Memory. Currently, futures created within a transaction cannot access the transactional state safely, violating the serializability of the transactions and leading to unexpected behavior. We define transactional tasks: a construct that allows futures to be created in transactions. Transactional tasks allow the parallelism in a transaction to be exploited, while providing safe access to the state of their encapsulating transaction. We show that transactional tasks have several useful properties: they are coordinated, they maintain serializability, and they do not introduce non-determinism. As such, transactional tasks combine futures and Software Transactional Memory, allowing the potential parallelism of a program to be fully exploited, while preserving the properties of the separate models where possible.
Wed 20 Jul
15:30 - 16:45: Research Track - Session 3 at Auditorium Loyola Chair(s): Colin GordonDrexel University | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| 15:30 - 15:55 Talk | Carl Friedrich Bolz-TereickKing's College London , Darya MelicherCarnegie Mellon University, Laurence TrattKing's College London Link to publication DOI Pre-print Media Attached | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| 15:55 - 16:20 Talk | Link to publication DOI Pre-print | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| 16:20 - 16:45 Talk | Janwillem SwalensVrije Universiteit Brussel, Joeri De KosterVrije Universiteit Brussel, Wolfgang De MeuterVrije Universiteit Brussel Link to publication DOI Pre-print Media Attached | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||