An Interference-Free Programming Model for Network Objects

TL;DR

D-SCOOP introduces an interference-free, transaction-like distributed programming model for network objects, automating synchronization and failure handling to simplify distributed object-oriented programming.

Contribution

It presents D-SCOOP, a novel distributed programming model that automates synchronization and failure management for network objects, extending multi-threaded concurrency semantics.

Findings

Automatic synchronization in D-SCOOP has minimal performance overhead.

D-SCOOP's synchronization performance matches or exceeds Java RMI locking.

The model enables interference-free reasoning on distributed objects.

Abstract

Network objects are a simple and natural abstraction for distributed object-oriented programming. Languages that support network objects, however, often leave synchronization to the user, along with its associated pitfalls, such as data races and the possibility of failure. In this paper, we present D-SCOOP, a distributed programming model that allows for interference-free and transaction-like reasoning on (potentially multiple) network objects, with synchronization handled automatically, and network failures managed by a compensation mechanism. We achieve this by leveraging the runtime semantics of a multi-threaded object-oriented concurrency model, directly generalizing it with a message-based protocol for efficiently coordinating remote objects. We present our pathway to fusing these contrasting but complementary ideas, and evaluate the performance overhead of the automatic synchronization in D-SCOOP, finding that it comes close to---or outperforms---explicit locking-based synchronization in Java RMI.