A Survey of Active Object Languages

Frank de Boer (1) , Vlad Serbanescu (1) , Reiner Hähnle (2) , Ludovic Henrio (3, 4) , Justine Rochas (5, 4) , Crystal Chang Din (6) , Einar Broch Johnsen (6) , Marjan Sirjani (7, 8) , Ehsan Khamespanah (9, 10) , Kiko Fernandez-Reyes (11) , Albert Mingkun Yang (11)

1 CWI - Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica
2 TU Darmstadt - Technische Universität Darmstadt - Technical University of Darmstadt
3 CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique
4 I3S - Laboratoire d'Informatique, Signaux, et Systèmes de Sophia Antipolis
5 COMUE UCA - COMUE Université Côte d'Azur (2015-2019)
6 Department of Informatics [Oslo]
7 Reykjavík University
8 Mälardalen University
9 Reykjavík University
10 University of Tehran
11 Uppsala Universitet [Uppsala]

To program parallel systems efficiently and easily, a wide range of programming models have been proposed, each with different choices concerning synchronization and communication between parallel entities. Among them, the actor model is based on loosely coupled parallel entities that communicate by means of asynchronous messages and mailboxes. Some actor languages provide a strong integration with object-oriented concepts; these are often called active object languages. This paper reviews four major actor and active object languages and compares them according to carefully chosen dimensions that cover central aspects of the programming paradigms and their implementation.

Mots clés: Programming languages; active objects; actors; concurrency; distributed systems

Domaines: Calcul parallèle, distribué et partagé [cs.DC]

Frank de Boer, Vlad Serbanescu, Reiner Hähnle, Ludovic Henrio, Justine Rochas, et al.. A Survey of Active Object Languages. ACM Computing Surveys, 2017, 50 (5), pp.1 - 39. ⟨10.1145/3122848⟩. ⟨hal-01627936⟩