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The Join Calculus Language

The join-calculus has been designed in BRA Confer-1 by Fournet and Gonthier. It is a variant of the PICT language, specially defined for a distributed implementation on any Unix-like environment. The basic difference with respect to PICT is to impose a single location for receptors on any communication channel.

Version 1.04 has been released in June by Fournet and Maranget. This prototype includes a distributed implementation of the join-calculus, which is about 20000 lines of Caml-light code. The system comprises a byte-code compiler, a run-time interpreter, an on-line documentation, a tutorial and many examples. As demo programs, we have a distributed calculation of the Mandelbrot set and several distributed games. In this release of the join-calculus, the syntax of the language is very similar with the one of Caml, and there is a type-inference system including a polymorphic typing discipline a la ML, a natural interface system for CAML-light, which gives access to the graphics library. Failures have also been implemented, but only the voluntary ones. True asynchronous permanent failures will be implemented in a future release.

An article on the type-inference algorithm and a demo were presented at CONCUR'97 [FLMR97] and at TACS'97 [Le97]. The system is available at http://www.pauillac.inria/join/.


next up previous contents
Next: A distributed garbage collector Up: Programming Languages Previous: Programming Languages

1/10/1998