An Efficient Abstract Machine for Safe Ambients

Daniel Hirschkoff (1, 2) , Damien Pous (1, 2) , Davide Sangiorgi (3)

1 LIP - Laboratoire de l'Informatique du Parallélisme
2 PLUME - Preuves et Langages
3 DISI - Dipartimento di Scienze dell'Informazione [Bologna]

Safe Ambients (SA) are a variant of the Ambient Calculus (AC) in which types can be used to avoid certain forms of interferences among processes called grave interferences. An abstract machine, called GcPan, for a distributed implementation of typed SA is presented and studied. Our machine improves over previous proposals for executing AC, or variants of it, mainly through a better management of special agents (the forwarders), created upon code migration to transmit messages to the target location of the migration. Well-known methods (such as reference counting and union-find) are applied in order to garbage collect forwarders, thus avoiding long – possibly distributed – chains of forwarders, as well as avoiding useless persistent forwarders. We present the proof of correctness of GcPan w.r.t. typed SA processes. We describe a distributed implementation of the abstract machine in OCaml. More broadly, this study is a contribution towards understanding issues of correctness and optimisations in implementations of distributed languages encompassing mobility.

Domaines: Informatique [cs]

Daniel Hirschkoff, Damien Pous, Davide Sangiorgi. An Efficient Abstract Machine for Safe Ambients. Journal of Logic and Algebraic Programming, 2007, ⟨10.1016/j.jlap.2007.02.003⟩. ⟨hal-01442746⟩