The PCKS-Machine: An Abstract Machine for Sound Evaluation of Parallel Functional Programs with First-Class Continuations

Abstract

The PCKS-machine is an abstract machine that evaluates parallel functional programs with first-class continuations. Parallelism is introduced by the construct pcall, which provides a fork-and-join type of parallelism. To the best of our knowledge, the PCKS-machine is the first implementation of such a language that is proved to have a transparent construct for parallelism: every program using such a construct returns the same result as in the absence of this construct. This machine is also characterised by the non-speculative invocation of continuations whose interest is illustrated in an application. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.