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Thread-Safe Reactive Programming

Drechsler, Joscha ; Mogk, Ragnar ; Salvaneschi, Guido ; Mezini, Mira (2018):
Thread-Safe Reactive Programming. (Publisher's Version)
In: Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages, 2 (OOPSLA), pp. 1-30. ACM, ISSN 2475-1421,
DOI: 10.25534/tuprints-00014555,
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Item Type: Article
Origin: Secondary publication via Golden Open Access
Status: Publisher's Version
Title: Thread-Safe Reactive Programming
Language: English
Abstract:

The execution of an application written in a reactive language involves transfer of data and control flow between imperative and reactive abstractions at well-defined points. In a multi-threaded environment, multiple such interactions may execute concurrently, potentially causing data races and event ordering ambiguities. Existing RP languages either disable multi-threading or handle it at the cost of reducing expressiveness or weakening consistency. This paper proposes a model for thread-safe reactive programming (RP) that ensures abort-free strict serializability under concurrency while sacrificing neither expressiveness nor consistency. We also propose an architecture for integrating a corresponding scheduler into the RP language runtime, such that thread-safety is provided "out-of-the-box" to the applications. We show the feasibility of our proposal by providing and evaluating a ready-to-use implementation integrated into the REScala programming language. The scheduling algorithm is formally proven correct. A thorough empirical evaluation shows that reactive applications build on top of it scale with multiple threads, while the scheduler incurs acceptable performance overhead in a single-threaded configuration. The scalability enabled by our scheduler is roughly on-par with that of hand-crafted application-specific locking and better than the scalability enabled by a scheduler using an off-the-shelf software transactional memory library.

Journal or Publication Title: Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages
Volume of the journal: 2
Issue Number: OOPSLA
Publisher: ACM
Classification DDC: 000 Allgemeines, Informatik, Informationswissenschaft > 004 Informatik
Divisions: 20 Department of Computer Science > Software Technology
DFG-Collaborative Research Centres (incl. Transregio) > Collaborative Research Centres > CRC 1053: MAKI – Multi-Mechanisms Adaptation for the Future Internet > A: Construction Methodology > Subproject A2: Design
DFG-Collaborative Research Centres (incl. Transregio) > Collaborative Research Centres > CRC 1053: MAKI – Multi-Mechanisms Adaptation for the Future Internet > C: Communication Mechanisms > Subproject C2: Information-centred perspective
Date Deposited: 04 Dec 2020 08:51
Last Modified: 06 Dec 2020 06:21
DOI: 10.25534/tuprints-00014555
Corresponding Links:
URN: urn:nbn:de:tuda-tuprints-145553
URI: https://tuprints.ulb.tu-darmstadt.de/id/eprint/14555
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