Lasp: a language for distributed, coordination-free programming

We propose Lasp, a new programming model designed to simplify large-scale distributed programming. Lasp combines ideas from deterministic dataflow programming together with conflict-free replicated data types (CRDTs). This provides support for computations where not all participants are online together at a given moment. The initial design presented here provides powerful primitives for composing CRDTs, which lets us write long-lived fault-tolerant distributed applications with nonmonotonic behavior in a monotonic framework. Given reasonable models of node-to-node communications and node failures, we prove formally that a Lasp program can be considered as a functional program that supports functional reasoning and programming techniques. We have implemented Lasp as an Erlang library built on top of the Riak Core distributed systems framework. We have developed one nontrivial large-scale application, the advertisement counter scenario from the SyncFree research project. We plan to extend our current prototype into a general-purpose language in which synchronization is used as little as possible.