Parallel object-oriented programming with multiple inheritance: language design issues

Abstract

The transition from sequential object-oriented programming (OOP) to parallelism has been in the focus of active research. Experimental languages that try to integrate objects and parallelism are often seriously compromised in their capability to provide inheritance for parallel objects. Even languages that permit some amalgamation of parallelism and inheritance tend to support only single-class inheritance. The purpose of this paper is to specify a strongly typed language framework for parallel object-oriented programming which provides easy-to-use multiple inheritance for parallel objects, including inheritance for synchronization code. The proposed approach to parallelism is based on "separate" methods which generate processes and provide rendezvous-type coordination: it succeeds in cases where known languages fail to combine inheritance with parallelism. Or do it inefficiently and inconveniently.<>