Task Frames

TL;DR

This paper proposes an alternative to traditional routine execution by using task frames instead of activation frames, enabling more flexible and external management of application execution.

Contribution

It introduces the concept of task frames for routine execution and demonstrates its feasibility with a crude implementation, enabling external control and parallel execution.

Findings

Feasibility of task frame execution demonstrated

Potential for external, transparent, and parallel execution of routines

Extension possibilities for more advanced execution environments

Abstract

Forty years ago Dijkstra introduced the current conventional execution of routines. It places activation frames onto a stack. Each frame is the internal state of an executing routine. The resulting application execution is not easily helped by an external system. This presentation proposes an alternative execution of routines. It places task frames onto the stack. A task frame is the call of a routine to be executed. The feasibility of the alternative execution is demonstrated by a crude implementation. As described elsewhere, an application which executes in terms of tasks can be provided by an external system with a transparent reliable, distributed, heterogeneous, adaptive, dynamic, real-time, parallel, secure or other execution. By extending the crude implementation, this presentation outlines a simple transparent parallel execution.