Minimal Ownership for Active Objects

Active objects offer a structured approach to concurrency, encapsulating both unshared state and a thread of control. For efficient data transfer, data should be passed by reference whenever possible, but this introduces aliasing and undermines the validity of the active objects. This paper proposes a minimal variant of ownership types that preserves the required race freedom invariant yet enables data transfer by reference between active objects (that is, without copying) in many cases, and a cheap clone operation where copying is necessary. Our approach is general and should be adaptable to several existing active object systems.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: APLAS
• Authors: Dave Clarke, Tobias Wrigstad, Johan Östlund, Einar Broch Johnsen
• Keywords: Active Object, Active Object Systems, APLAS 2008, Data Transfer, Programming Languages