A Tour of Gallifrey, a Language for Geodistributed Programming

Authors Mae Milano , Rolph Recto, Tom Magrino, Andrew C. Myers



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Author Details

Mae Milano
  • Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA
Rolph Recto
  • Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA
Tom Magrino
  • Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA
Andrew C. Myers
  • Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Fabian Muehlboeck, Andrew Hirsch, the members of the Applied Programming Languages Group at Cornell University, and our anonymous SNAPL reviewers for their helpful feedback on drafts of this paper.

Cite As Get BibTex

Mae Milano, Rolph Recto, Tom Magrino, and Andrew C. Myers. A Tour of Gallifrey, a Language for Geodistributed Programming. In 3rd Summit on Advances in Programming Languages (SNAPL 2019). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 136, pp. 11:1-11:19, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2019) https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.SNAPL.2019.11

Abstract

Programming efficient distributed, concurrent systems requires new abstractions that go beyond traditional sequential programming. But programmers already have trouble getting sequential code right, so simplicity is essential. The core problem is that low-latency, high-availability access to data requires replication of mutable state. Keeping replicas fully consistent is expensive, so the question is how to expose asynchronously replicated objects to programmers in a way that allows them to reason simply about their code. We propose an answer to this question in our ongoing work designing a new language, Gallifrey, which provides orthogonal replication through _restrictions_ with _merge strategies_, _contingencies_ for conflicts arising from concurrency, and _branches_, a novel concurrency control construct inspired by version control, to contain provisional behavior.

Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Software and its engineering → Cooperating communicating processes
  • Software and its engineering → Massively parallel systems
  • Software and its engineering → Distributed programming languages
Keywords
  • programming languages
  • distributed systems
  • weak consistency
  • linear types

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