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Fair Join Pattern Matching for Actors

Authors Philipp Haller , Ayman Hussein , Hernán Melgratti , Alceste Scalas , Emilio Tuosto

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Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Software and its engineering → Formal language definitions
  • Software and its engineering → Domain specific languages
  • Software and its engineering → Concurrent programming languages
  • Software and its engineering → Distributed programming languages
  • Theory of computation → Process calculi
Keywords
  • Concurrency
  • join patterns
  • join calculus
  • actor model

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Abstract

Join patterns provide a promising approach to the development of concurrent and distributed message-passing applications. Several variations and implementations have been presented in the literature - but various aspects remain under-explored: in particular, how to specify a suitable notion of message matching, how to implement it correctly and efficiently, and how to systematically evaluate the implementation performance.
In this work we focus on actor-based programming, and study the application of join patterns with conditional guards (i.e., the most expressive and challenging version of join patterns in literature). We formalise a novel specification of fair and deterministic join pattern matching, ensuring that older messages are always consumed if they can be matched. We present a stateful, tree-based join pattern matching algorithm and prove that it correctly implements our fair and deterministic matching specification. We present a novel Scala 3 actor library (called JoinActors) that implements our join pattern formalisation, leveraging macros to provide an intuitive API. Finally, we evaluate the performance of our implementation, by introducing a systematic benchmarking approach that takes into account the nuances of join pattern matching (in particular, its sensitivity to input traffic and complexity of patterns and guards).

Cite As Get BibTex

Philipp Haller, Ayman Hussein, Hernán Melgratti, Alceste Scalas, and Emilio Tuosto. Fair Join Pattern Matching for Actors. In 38th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP 2024). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 313, pp. 17:1-17:28, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2024) https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.ECOOP.2024.17

Author Details

Philipp Haller
  • KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden
Ayman Hussein
  • Technical University of Denmark, Lyngby, Denmark
Hernán Melgratti
  • University of Buenos Aires & Conicet, Argentina
Alceste Scalas
  • Technical University of Denmark, Lyngby, Denmark
Emilio Tuosto
  • Gran Sasso Science Institute, L'Aquila, Italy

Funding

  • Hussein, Ayman: Research supported by the Horizon Europe grant 101093006 (TaRDIS).
  • Scalas, Alceste: Research partly supported by the Horizon Europe grant 101093006 (TaRDIS).
  • Tuosto, Emilio: Research partly supported by the EU H2020 RISE programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 778233, the PRIN PNRR project DeLICE (P20223T2MF), by the MUR dipartimento di eccellenza, and by PNRR MUR project VITALITY (ECS00000041), Spoke 2 ASTRA - Advanced Space Technologies and Research Alliance.

Acknowledgements

This work was inspired by the group discussion on "Join patterns / synchronisation - the next generation" [Dezani et al., 2022] at the Dagstuhl Seminar 21372; we thank the organisers of the meeting and Schloss Dagstuhl - Leibniz Center for Informatics for making this work possible. We thank Omar Inverso for the technical support he provided for our experimental evaluation, Roland Kuhn for fruitful discussions on the shop floor use case, António Ravara for some useful suggestions, and Antoine Sébert for an implementation of join patterns using Scala 3 macros [Sébert, 2022]. We thank the anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions.

Supplementary Materials

References

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