ÆMINIUM: A Permission Based Concurrent-by-Default Programming Language Approach

Authors

Abstract

Writing concurrent applications is extremely challenging, not only in terms of producing bug-free and maintainable software, but also for enabling developer productivity. In this paper we present the ÆMINIUM concurrent-by-default programming language. Using ÆMINIUM programmers express data dependencies rather than control flow between instructions. Dependencies are expressed using permissions, which are used by the type system to automatically parallelize the application. The ÆMINIUM approach provides a modular and composable mechanism for writing concurrent applications, preventing data races in a provable way. This allows programmers to shift their attention from low-level, error-prone reasoning about thread interleaving and synchronization to focus on the core functionality of their applications. We study the semantics of ÆMINIUM through ?ÆMINIUM, a sound core calculus that leverages permission flow to enable concurrent-by-default execution. After discussing our prototype implementation we present several case studies of our system. Our case studies show up to 6.5X speedup on an eight-core machine when leveraging data group permissions to manage access to shared state, and more than 70% higher throughput in a web server application.

Keywords

access permissions, permissions, data groups, concurrency

Subject

ÆMINIUM: A Permission Based Concurrent-by-Default Programming Language Approach

Related Project

AEMINIUM - Freeing Programmers from the Shackles of Sequentiality

Journal

ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems, Vol. 36, #1, pp. 2, Jens Palsberg, March 2014

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DOI