An efficient abstract machine for Safe Ambients

AbstractSafe Ambients (SA) are a variant of the Ambient Calculus (AC) in which types can be used to avoid certain forms of interferences among processes called grave interferences.An abstract machine, called GcPan, for a distributed implementation of typed SA is presented and studied. Our machine improves over previous proposals for executing AC, or variants of it, mainly through a better management of special agents (the forwarders), created upon code migration to transmit messages to the target location of the migration. Well-known methods (such as reference counting and union-find) are applied in order to garbage collect forwarders, thus avoiding long – possibly distributed – chains of forwarders, as well as avoiding useless persistent forwarders.We present the proof of correctness of GcPan w.r.t. typed SA processes. We describe a distributed implementation of the abstract machine in OCaml.More broadly, this study is a contribution towards understanding issues of correctness and optimisations in implementations of distributed languages encompassing mobility

An Efficient Abstract Machine for Safe Ambients

Abstract. We describe an abstract machine, called GcPan, for the distributed execution of Safe Ambients (SA), a variant of the Ambient Calculus (AC). Our machine improves over previous proposals for executing AC, or variants of it, mainly through a better management of special agents (forwarders), created upon code migration to transmit messages to the target location of the migration. We establish the correctness of our machine by proving a weak bisimilarity result with a previous abstract machine for SA, and then appealing to the correctness of the latter machine. More broadly, this study is a contribution towards understanding issues of correctness and optimisations in implementations of distributed languages encompassing mobility