Acute: high-level programming language design for distributed computation

Existing languages provide good support for typeful programming of standalone programs. In a distributed system, however, there may be interaction between multiple instances of many distinct programs, sharing some (but not necessarily all) of their module structure, and with some instances rebuilt with new versions of certain modules as time goes on. In this paper we discuss programminglanguage support for such systems, focussing on their typing and naming issues. We describe an experimental language, Acute, which extends an ML core to support distributed development, deployment, and execution, allowing type-safe interaction between separately-built programs. The main features are: (1) type-safe marshalling of arbitrary values; (2) type names that are generated (freshly and by hashing) to ensure that type equality tests suffice to protect the inof abstract types, across the entire distributed system; (3) expression-level names generated to ensure that name equality tests suffice for t...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: ICFP
• Authors: Peter Sewell, James J. Leifer, Keith Wansbrough, Francesco Zappa Nardelli, Mair Allen-Williams, Pierre Habouzit, Viktor Vafeiadis
• Keywords: Entire Distributed System, Equality Tests Suffice, ICFP 2005, Programming Languages, Typeful Distributed Programming