Dynamic rebinding for marshalling and update, with destruct-time ?

  • Authors:

  • Gavin Bierman;Michael Hicks;Peter Sewell;Gareth Stoyle;Keith Wansbrough

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Cambridge;University of Maryland, College Park;University of Cambridge;University of Cambridge;University of Cambridge

  • Venue:
  • ICFP '03 Proceedings of the eighth ACM SIGPLAN international conference on Functional programming
  • Year:
  • 2003

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Abstract

Most programming languages adopt static binding, but for distributed programming an exclusive reliance on static binding is too restrictive: dynamic binding is required in various guises, for example when a marshalled value is received from the network, containing identifiers that must be rebound to local resources. Typically it is provided only by ad-hoc mechanisms that lack clean semantics.In this paper we adopt a foundational approach, developing core dynamic rebinding mechanisms as extensions to simply-typed call-by-value ? -calculus. To do so we must first explore refinements of the call-by-value reduction strategy that delay instantiation, to ensure computations make use of the most recent versions of rebound definitions. We introduce redex-time and destruct-time strategies. The latter forms the basis for a ?marsh calculus that supports dynamic rebinding of marshalled values, while remaining as far as possible statically-typed. We sketch an extension of ? marsh with concurrency and communication, giving examples showing how wrappers for encapsulating untrusted code can be expressed. Finally, we show that a high-level semantics for dynamic updating can also be based on the destruct-time strategy, defining a ?marsh calculus with simple primitives to provide type-safe updating of running code. We thereby establish primitives and a common semantic foundation for a variety of real-world dynamic rebinding requirements.