Programming with Managed Time

Abstract

Most languages expose the computer's ability to globally read and write memory at any time. Programmers must then choreograph control flow so all reads and writes occur in correct relative orders, which can be difficult particularly when dealing with initialization, reactivity, and concurrency. Just as many languages now manage memory to unburden us from properly freeing memory, they should also manage time to automatically order memory accesses for us in the interests of comprehensibility, correctness, and simplicity. Time management is a general language feature with a large design space that is largely unexplored; we offer this perspective to relate prior work and guide future research.