Minimal Ownership for Active Objects

  • Authors:
  • Dave Clarke;Tobias Wrigstad;Johan Östlund;Einar Broch Johnsen

  • Affiliations:
  • CWI, Amsterdam, The Netherlands;Purdue University, USA;Purdue University, USA;University of Oslo, Norway

  • Venue:
  • APLAS '08 Proceedings of the 6th Asian Symposium on Programming Languages and Systems
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

Active objects offer a structured approach to concurrency, encapsulating both unshared state and a thread of control. For efficient data transfer, data should be passed by reference whenever possible, but this introduces aliasing and undermines the validity of the active objects. This paper proposes a minimal variant of ownership types that preserves the required race freedom invariant yet enables data transfer by reference between active objects (that is, without copying) in many cases, and a cheap clone operation where copying is necessary. Our approach is general and should be adaptable to several existing active object systems.