Minimising virtual machine support for concurrency

Simon Dobson
(University of St Andrews)
Alan Dearle
(University of St Andrews)
Barry Porter
(University of St Andrews)

Co-operative and pre-emptive scheduling are usually considered to be complementary models of threading. In the case of virtual machines, we show that they can be unified using a single concept, the bounded execution of a thread of control, essentially providing a first-class representation of a computation as it is reduced. Furthermore this technique can be used to surface the thread scheduler of a language into the language itself, allowing programs to provide their own schedulers without any additional support in the virtual machine, and allowing the same virtual machine to support different thread models simultaneously and without re-compilation.

In Nobuko Yoshida and Wim Vanderbauwhede: Proceedings 5th Workshop on Programming Language Approaches to Concurrency and Communication-cEntric Software (PLACES 2013), Rome, Italy, 23rd March 2013, Electronic Proceedings in Theoretical Computer Science 137, pp. 135–141.
Published: 8th December 2013.

ArXived at: https://dx.doi.org/10.4204/EPTCS.137.11 bibtex PDF
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