Towards Efficient Abstractions for Concurrent Consensus

TL;DR

This paper introduces a programming language with built-in consensus support via communicating transactions, addressing efficiency challenges and evaluating implementation strategies through experimental architecture to improve concurrent consensus mechanisms.

Contribution

It proposes a language design with integrated consensus constructs and evaluates various implementation heuristics for efficient execution in concurrent systems.

Findings

Communicating transactions effectively support consensus in concurrent programming.

Experimental evaluation identifies promising implementation heuristics.

The approach advances practical language support for consensus in distributed systems.

Abstract

Consensus is an often occurring problem in concurrent and distributed programming. We present a programming language with simple semantics and build-in support for consensus in the form of communicating transactions. We motivate the need for such a construct with a characteristic example of generalized consensus which can be naturally encoded in our language. We then focus on the challenges in achieving an implementation that can efficiently run such programs. We setup an architecture to evaluate different implementation alternatives and use it to experimentally evaluate runtime heuristics. This is the basis for a research project on realistic programming language support for consensus.