A Customizable Substrate for Concurrent Languages

Abstract

We describe an approach to implementing a wide-range of concurrency paradigms in high-level (symbolic) programming languages. The focus of our discussion is STING, a dialect of Scheme, that supports lightweight threads of control and virtual processors as first-class objects. Given the significant degree to which the behavior of these objects may be customized, we can easily express a variety of concurrency paradigms and linguistic structures within a common framework without loss of efficiency.