From Events to Reactions: A Progress Report

TL;DR

This paper introduces Syndicate, a novel concurrent programming language that combines shared and message-passing paradigms, and discusses enhancing it with reactive programming features to improve abstraction and coordination.

Contribution

It presents the design of Syndicate, a new language for coordinated concurrency, and proposes reactive programming constructs to elevate its abstraction level.

Findings

Syndicate simplifies concurrent coordination through controlled shared knowledge.

Preliminary reactive constructs are proposed for Syndicate.

The approach bridges shared-everything and shared-nothing paradigms.

Abstract

Syndicate is a new coordinated, concurrent programming language. It occupies a novel point on the spectrum between the shared-everything paradigm of threads and the shared-nothing approach of actors. Syndicate actors exchange messages and share common knowledge via a carefully controlled database that clearly scopes conversations. This approach clearly simplifies coordination of concurrent activities. Experience in programming with Syndicate, however, suggests a need to raise the level of linguistic abstraction. In addition to writing event handlers and managing event subscriptions directly, the language will have to support a reactive style of programming. This paper presents event-oriented Syndicate programming and then describes a preliminary design for augmenting it with new reactive programming constructs.