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Theory and Practice of Formal Methods pp 140–154Cite as

Vats: A Safe, Reactive Storage Abstraction

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 9660))

Abstract

The rise of multicore computers has hastened the advent of multifarious abstractions to facilitate the construction of parallel programs. This paper presents another: the vat. A vat is like a variable, but it has various actions attached to it that can block, transform and react to changes to the vat. Vats can be combined together in various ways, linking the behaviours of the vats together, resulting in various synchronisation mechanisms. Vats are powerful enough to encode (part of) many existing mechanisms including promises, condition variables, LVars and reactive programming.

Partly funded by the EU project FP7-612985 UpScale: From Inherent Concurrency to Massive Parallelism through Type-based Optimisations.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For performance, non-blocking synchronous reads and write can be allowed. If used in a multi-threaded setting, these are subject to data races and may observe inconsistent or uninitialised states of vats. Synchronous reads and writes have the following types:

    • sread \({:}{:}\) \(\mathtt {Vat}\ \tau \rightarrow \tau \)

    • swrite \({:}{:}\) \(\mathtt {Vat}\ \tau \rightarrow \tau \rightarrow \texttt {Bool}\) — result indicates whether write succeeded.

  2. 2.

    A better result type for this function would be \(\mathtt {ReadVat}\ \tau \), corresponding to just the read interface of a vat.

  3. 3.

    Vats were originally called Franks.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Information Technology, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden

    Dave Clarke & Tobias Wrigstad

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  1. Dave Clarke
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  2. Tobias Wrigstad
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Correspondence to Dave Clarke .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Informatik 2, RWTH Aachen University Informatik 2, Aachen, Germany

    Erika Ábrahám

  2. Leiden University , Leiden, The Netherlands

    Marcello Bonsangue

  3. University of Oslo , Oslo, Norway

    Einar Broch Johnsen

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Clarke, D., Wrigstad, T. (2016). Vats: A Safe, Reactive Storage Abstraction. In: Ábrahám, E., Bonsangue, M., Johnsen, E. (eds) Theory and Practice of Formal Methods. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9660. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-30734-3_11

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-30734-3_11

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