Inactive.
Coqa is a new object-oriented language, (for Concurrent objects with quantized atomicity), which builds concurrency and atomicity-by-design deeply into the object model. This ongoing project aims to reconsider of the “right” concurrency model for tightly-coupled computations that can be easily deployable on multi-core CPUs. This project is now a joint collaboration between JHU and SUNY Binghamton.
The design of Coqa follows six principles that we believe are crucial for a concurrent programming language:
From a programming perspective, Coqa has three desirable properties, from higher- to lower-level as follows:
Each method is composed of several discrete quanta, and execution of each quantum is serializable regardless of the interleaving of the actual execution.
Our language guarantees state change happens in a predictable way, even across different quanta of a task.
No race conditions ever arise in object field access.
Coqa currently consists of a formal system, KernelCoqa and a prototype implementation CoqaJava.
Aditya Kulkarni, Yu David Liu, Scott Smith. Task Types for Pervasive Atomicity, Proceedings of the 25th ACM Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages and Applications (OOPSLA 2010). Reno, Nevada, USA, October 2010. Slides.
Atomic regions are an important concept in correct concurrent programming: since atomic regions can be viewed as having executed in a single step, atomicity greatly reduces the number of possible interleavings the programmer needs to consider. This paper describes a method for building atomicity into a programming language in an organic fashion. We take the view that atomicity holds for whole threads by default, and a division into smaller atomic regions occurs only at points where an explicit need for sharing is needed and declared. A corollary of this view is every line of code is part of some atomic region. We define a polymorphic type system, Task Types, to enforce most of the desired atomicity properties statically. We show the reasonableness of our type system by proving that type soundness, isolation invariance, and atomicity enforcement properties hold at run time. We also present initial results of a Task Types implementation built on Java.
Yu David Liu, Xiaoqi Lu, and Scott Smith. Coqa: Concurrent Objects with Quantized Atomicity. Compiler Construction (CC), 2008. Slides.
This paper introduces a new language model, Coqa, for deeply embedding concurrent programming into objects. Every program written in our language has the desirable behaviors of atomicity, mutual exclusion, and race freedom automatically built in. A key property of our model is the notion of quantized atomicity: every concurrent program execution can be viewed as being divided into quantum regions of atomic execution, greatly reducing the number of interleavings to consider. So rather than building atomicity locally, with small declared zones, we build it globally, down from the top. We justify our approach both from a theoretical basis by showing that a formal representation, KernelCoqa, has provable quantized atomicity properties, and by implementing CoqaJava, a Java extension incorporating all of the Coqa features.