The Join Calculus: A Language for Distributed Mobile Programming

In these notes, we give an overview of the join calculus, its semantics, and its equational theory. The join calculus is a language that models distributed and mobile programming. It is characterized by an explicit notion of locality, a strict adherence to local synchronization, and a direct embedding of the ML programming language. The join calculus is used as the basis for several distributed languages and implementations, such as JoCaml and functional nets. Local synchronization means that messages always travel to a set destination, and can interact only after they reach that destination; this is required for an efficient implementation. Specifically, the join calculus uses ML’s function bindings and pattern-matching on messages to program these synchronizations in a declarative manner. Formally, the language owes much to concurrency theory, which provides a strong basis for stating and proving the properties of asynchronous programs. Because of several remarkable identities, th...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2000
• Where: AC
• Authors: Cédric Fournet, Georges Gonthier
• Keywords: AC 2000, Calculus Uses Ml, Join Calculus, Local Synchronization, Software Engineering