Skip to main content

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
Cancel
×
×
Home
  • Home
Article
  • Cited by 4
  • Cited by
    Crossref Citations
    Crossref logo
    This article has been cited by the following publications. This list is generated based on data provided by CrossRef.
    Koutavas, Vasileios Gazda, Maciej and Hennessy, Matthew 2018. Distinguishing between communicating transactions. Information and Computation, Vol. 259, Issue. , p. 1.
    Liu, Xi Yang, Shaofa and Sanders, J. W. 2014. Compensation by design. Formal Aspects of Computing, Vol. 26, Issue. 4, p. 623.
    Turon, Aaron 2012. Reagents. ACM SIGPLAN Notices, Vol. 47, Issue. 6, p. 157.
    ZIAREK, LUKASZ and JAGANNATHAN, SURESH 2010. Lightweight checkpointing for concurrent ML. Journal of Functional Programming, Vol. 20, Issue. 02, p. 137.
    ×
  • Get access
    Add to cart USD35.00
    Check if you have access via personal or institutional login
    Log in Register Recommend to librarian

Transactional events1

  • KEVIN DONNELLY (a1) and MATTHEW FLUET (a2)
Abstract

Concurrent programs require high-level abstractions in order to manage complexity and enable compositional reasoning. In this paper, we introduce a novel concurrency abstraction, dubbed transactional events, which combines first-class synchronous message passing events with all-or-nothing transactions. This combination enables simple solutions to interesting problems in concurrent programming. For example, guarded synchronous receive can be implemented as an abstract transactional event, whereas in other languages it requires a non-abstract, non-modular protocol. As another example, three-way rendezvous can be implemented as an abstract transactional event, which is impossible using first-class events alone. Both solutions are easy to code and easy to reason about.

The expressive power of transactional events arises from a sequencing combinator whose semantics enforces an all-or-nothing transactional property – either both of the constituent events synchronize in sequence or neither of them synchronizes. This sequencing combinator, along with a non-deterministic choice combinator, gives transactional events the compositional structure of a monad-with-plus. We provide a formal semantics for transactional events and give a detailed account of an implementation.

Copyright
COPYRIGHT: © Cambridge University Press 2008
Footnotes
Hide All
2Portions of this work were completed while the author was affiliated with Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853, US.
1

This is a revised and extended version of the paper that appeared in the Eleventh ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Functional Programming (ICFP'06) (Donnelly & Fluet, 2006).

Footnotes
References
Hide All
Adl-Tabatabai, Ali-Reza, Lewis, Brian T., Menon, Vijay, Murphy, Brian R., Saha, Bratin & Shpeisman, Tatiana. (2006) Compiler and runtime support for efficient software transactional memory. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI'06). New York: ACM Press, pp. 26–37.
Armstrong, Joe, Virding, Robert, Wikström, Claes & Williams, Mike. (1996) Concurrent Programming in Erlang, 2nd ed. Hertfordshire, UK: Prentice Hall International (UK) Ltd.
Donnelly, Kevin & Fluet, Matthew. (2006) Transactional events. In Proceedings of the Eleventh ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Functional Programming (ICFP'06). New York: ACM Press, pp. 124–135.
Flatt, Matthew & Findler, Robert Bruce. (2004) Kill-safe synchronization abstractions. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI'04). New York: ACM Press, pp. 47–58.
Gasner, Emden R. & Reppy, John H. (1993) A multi-threaded high-order user interface toolkit. In User Interface Software, Bass, Len & Dewan, Prasun (eds). Software Trends, Vol. 1. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Chap. 4, pp. 61–80.
Glasgow Haskell Compiler (version 6.6). (2006) http://www.haskell.org/ghc.
Grossman, Dan. (April 2006) Software Transactions are to Concurrency as Garbage Collection is to Memory Management. Tech. Rept. 2006-04-01. University of Washington, Department of Computer Science & Engineering.
Harris, Tim & Fraser, Keir. (2003) Language support for lightweight transactions. In Proceedings of the 18th Annual ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Object-Oriented Programing, Systems, Languages, and Applications (OOPSLA'03). New York: ACM Press, pp. 388–402.
Harris, Tim, Marlow, Simon & Peyton Jones, Simon. (2005a) Haskell on a shared-memory multiprocessor. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN Workshop on Haskell. New York: ACM Press, pp. 49–61.
Harris, Tim, Marlow, Simon, Peyton Jones, Simon & Herlihy, Maurice. (2005b) Composable memory transactions. In Proceedings of the Tenth ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming (PPoPP'05). New York: ACM Press, pp. 48–60.
Harris, Tim, Plesko, Mark, Shinnar, Avraham & Tarditi, David. (2006) Optimizing memory transactions. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI'06). New York: ACM Press, pp. 14–25.
Herlihy, Maurice & Moss, J. Eliot B. (1993) Transactional memory: Architectural support for lock-free data structures. In Proceedings of the 20th Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA'93). New York: ACM Press, pp. 289–300.
Hindman, Benjamin & Grossman, Dan. (2006) Atomicity via source-to-source translation. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Memory System Performance and Correctness (MSPC'06). New York: ACM Press, pp. 82–91.
Hinze, Ralf. (2000) Deriving backtracking monad transformers (functional pearl). In Proceedings of the Fifth ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Functional Programming (ICFP'00). New York: ACM Press, pp. 186–197.
Hoare, C. A. R. (1978) Communicating sequential processes. Commun. ACM 21 (8), 666–677.
Jeffrey, Alan. (1995a) A fully abstract semantics for a concurrent functional language with monadic types. In Proceedings of the Tenth Annual IEEE Symposium on Logic in Computer Science (LICS'95). Los Alamitos, CA: IEEE Computer Society Press, pp. 255–265.
Jeffrey, Alan. (1995b) A fully abstract semantics for a nondeterministic functional language with monadic types. In Proceedings of the Eleventh Conference on the Mathematical Foundations of Programming Semantics (MFPS XI). Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science, Vol. 1. New York: Elsevier.
Karlsen, Einar. (1997) The UniForM Concurrency ToolKit and its extensions to Concurrent Haskell. In The Glasgow Functional Programming Workshop (GFPW).
Kiselyov, Oleg, Shan, Chung-chieh, Friedman, Daniel & Sabry, Amr. (2005) Backtracking, interleaving, and terminating monad transformers (functional pearl). In Proceedings of the Tenth ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Functional Programming (ICFP'05). New York: ACM Press, pp. 192–203.
Manson, Jeremy, Baker, Jason, Cunei, Antonio, Jagannathan, Suresh, Prochazka, Marek, Xin, Bin & Vitek, Jan. (2005) Preemptible atomic regions for real-time Java. In Proceedings of the 26th IEEE International Real-Time Systems Symposium (RTSS'05). Los Alamitos, CA: IEEE Computer Society, pp. 62–71.
Marlow, Simon, Peyton Jones, Simon, Moran, Andrew & Reppy, John. (2001) Asynchronous exceptions in Haskell. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI'01). New York: ACM Press, pp. 274–285.
Moggi, Eugino. (1989) Computational lambda calculus and monads. In Proceedings of the Fifth Annual IEEE Symposium on Logic in Computer Science (LICS'89). Los Alamitos, CA: IEEE Computer Society Press, pp. 14–23.
Moggi, Eugino. (1991) Notions of computation and monads. Info. Comput. 93 (1), 55–92.
MonadPlus. (2005) http://www.haskell.org/hawiki/MonadPlus.
Moran, Andrew, Lassen, Soren B. & Peyton Jones, Simon. (1999) Imprecise exceptions, co-inductively. In Proceedings of the Third International Workshop on Higher Order Operational Techniques in Semantics (HOOTS'99). Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science, Vol. 26. New York: Elsevier, pp. 122–141.
Moss, J. Eliot B. (1985) Nested Transactions: An Approach to Reliable Distributed Computing. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Panangaden, Prakash & Reppy, John. (1997) The essence of Concurrent ML. In ML with Concurrency: Design, Analysis, Implementation, and Application, Nielson, Flemming (ed). Monographs in Computer Science. New York: Springer-Verlag, Chap. 2, pp. 5–30.
Peyton Jones, Simon. (2001) Tackling the awkward squad: Monadic input/output, concurrency, exceptions, and foreign-language calls in Haskell. In Engineering Theories of Software Construction, Hoare, Tony, Broy, Manfred & Steinbrüggen, Ralf (eds). NATO Science Series: Computer & Systems Sciences, Vol. 180. Amsterdam, The Netherlands: IOS Press, pp. 47–96.
Peyton Jones, Simon, Gordon, Andrew & Finne, Sigbjorn. (1996) Concurrent Haskell. In Proceedings of the 23rd ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages (POPL'96). New York: ACM Press, pp. 295–308.
Peyton Jones, Simon, Reid, Alastair, Henderson, Fergus, Hoare, Tony & Marlow, Simon. (1999) A semantics for imprecise exceptions. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI'99). New York: ACM Press, pp. 25–36.
Peyton Jones, Simon, & Wadler, Philip. (1993) Imperative functional programming. In Proceedings of the 20th ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages (POPL'93). New York: ACM Press, pp. 71–84.
Pike, Rob. (1989) A concurrent window system. Comput. Syst. 2 (2), 133–153.
Reppy, John. (1999) Concurrent Programming in ML. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Ringenburg, Michael F. & Grossman, Dan. (2005) AtomCaml: First-class atomicity via rollback. In Proceedings of the Tenth ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Functional Programming (ICFP'05). New York: ACM Press, pp. 92–104.
Russell, George. (2001) Events in Haskell, and how to implement them. In Proceedings of the Sixth ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Functional Programming (ICFP'01). New York: ACM Press, pp. 157–168.
Sangiorgi, David & Walker, David. (2001) The π-Calculus: A Theory of Mobile Processes. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Shavit, Nir & Touitou, Dan. (1997) Software transactional memory. Distribut. Comput. 10 (2), 99–116.
Turbak, Franklyn. (1996) First-class synchronization barriers. In Proceedings of the First ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Functional Programming (ICFP'96). New York: ACM Press, pp. 157–168.
Wadler, Philip. (1995) Monads for functional programming. In Advanced Functional Programming, Jeuring, Johan & Meijer, Erik (eds). Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 925. New York: Springer-Verlag.
Welc, Adam, Jagannathan, Suresh & Hosking, Antony L. (2004) Transactional monitors for concurrent objects. In Proceedings of the Eighteenth European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP'04). Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 3086. New York: Springer-Verlag, pp. 519–542.
Ziarek, Lukasz, Schatz, Philip & Jagannathan, Suresh. (2006) Stabilizers: A modular checkpointing abstraction for concurrent functional programs. In Proceedings of the Eleventh ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Functional Programming (ICFP'06). New York: ACM Press, pp. 136–147.
Recommend this journal

Email your librarian or administrator to recommend adding this journal to your organisation's collection.

Journal of Functional Programming
  • ISSN: 0956-7968
  • EISSN: 1469-7653
  • URL: /core/journals/journal-of-functional-programming
Please enter your name
Please enter a valid email address
Who would you like to send this to? *

CAPTCHA *

Skip to the audio challenge
×
Type Description Title
UNKNOWN
Supplementary materials

Donnelly supplementary material
Donnelly supplementary material

 Unknown (122 KB)
122 KB
PDF
Supplementary materials

Donnelly Supplementary Material
Appendix.pdf

 PDF (189 KB)
189 KB

Metrics

Altmetric attention score

Full text views

Total number of HTML views: 0
Total number of PDF views: 14 *
Loading metrics...

Abstract views

Total abstract views: 112 *
Loading metrics...

* Views captured on Cambridge Core between September 2016 - 12th June 2018. This data will be updated every 24 hours.

  • Cited by 4
  • Cited by
    Crossref Citations
    Crossref logo
    This article has been cited by the following publications. This list is generated based on data provided by CrossRef.
    Koutavas, Vasileios Gazda, Maciej and Hennessy, Matthew 2018. Distinguishing between communicating transactions. Information and Computation, Vol. 259, Issue. , p. 1.
    Liu, Xi Yang, Shaofa and Sanders, J. W. 2014. Compensation by design. Formal Aspects of Computing, Vol. 26, Issue. 4, p. 623.
    Turon, Aaron 2012. Reagents. ACM SIGPLAN Notices, Vol. 47, Issue. 6, p. 157.
    ZIAREK, LUKASZ and JAGANNATHAN, SURESH 2010. Lightweight checkpointing for concurrent ML. Journal of Functional Programming, Vol. 20, Issue. 02, p. 137.
    ×
  • Get access
    Add to cart USD35.00
    Check if you have access via personal or institutional login
    Log in Register Recommend to librarian

Transactional events1

  • KEVIN DONNELLY (a1) and MATTHEW FLUET (a2)
Submit a response

Discussion

No Discussion have been published for this article.

×

Reply to: Submit a response

Your details

Conflicting interests

Do you have any conflicting interests? *

Cancel
Confirm
×