Modules, abstract types, and distributed versioning

  • Authors:
  • Peter Sewell

  • Affiliations:
  • Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge

  • Venue:
  • POPL '01 Proceedings of the 28th ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT symposium on Principles of programming languages
  • Year:
  • 2001

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Abstract

In a wide-area distributed system it is often impractical to synchronise software updates, so one must deal with many coexisting versions. We study static typing support for modular wide-area programming, modelling separate compilation/linking and execution of programs that interact along typed channels. Interaction may involve communication of values of abstract types; we provide the developer with fine-grain versioning control of these types to support interoperation of old and new code. The system makes use of a second-class module system with singleton kinds; we give a novel operational semantics for separate compilation/linking and execution and prove soundness.