Linguistic symbiosis between actors and threads

Abstract

We describe a linguistic symbiosis between AmbientTalk, a flexible, domain-specific language for writing distributed programs and Java, a conventional object-oriented language. This symbiosis allows concerns related to distribution (service discovery, asynchronous communication, failure handling) to be handled in the domain-specific language, while still enabling the reuse of existing software components written in a conventional language. The symbiosis is novel in the sense that a mapping is defined between the concurrency models of both languages. AmbientTalk employs an inherently event-driven model based on actors, while conventional object-oriented languages employ a concurrency model based on threads. The contribution of this paper is a linguistic symbiosis which ensures that the invariants of the event-driven concurrency model are not violated by engaging in symbiosis with multi-threaded programs.