Inheritance and Synchronization with Enabled Sets

Abstract

We discuss several issues related to the integration of inheritance and concurrency in an object-oriented language to support fine-grain parallel algorithms. We present a reflective extension of the actor model to implement inheritance mechanisms within the actor model. We demonstrate that a particularly expressive and inheritable synchronization mechanism must support local reasoning, be composable, be first-class, and allow parameterization based on message content. We present such a mechanism based on the concept of enabled-sets, and illustrate each property. We have implemented enabled-sets in the Rosette prototyping testbed.