Causal-Consistent Reversibility in a Tuple-Based Language

Abstract

Causal-consistent reversibility is a natural way of undoing concurrent computations. We study causal-consistent reversibility in the context of μKlaim, a formal coordination language based on distributed tuple spaces. We consider both uncontrolled reversibility, suitable to study the basic properties of the reversibility mechanism, and controlled reversibility based on a rollback operator, more suitable for programming applications. The causality structure of the language, and thus the definition of its reversible semantics, differs from all the reversible languages in the literature because of its generative communication paradigm. In particular, the reversible behavior of μKlaim read primitive, reading a tuple without consuming it, cannot be matched using channel-based communication. We illustrate the reversible extensions of μKlaim on a simple, but realistic, application scenario.