Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Domain-Specific Language Design and Implementation (DSLDI 2015)

The goal of the DSLDI workshop is to bring together researchers and practitioners interested in sharing ideas on how DSLs should be designed, implemented, supported by tools, and applied in realistic application contexts. We are both interested in discovering how already known domains such as graph processing or machine learning can be best supported by DSLs, but also in exploring new domains that could be targeted by DSLs. More generally, we are interested in building a community that can drive forward the development of modern DSLs. These informal post-proceedings contain the submitted talk abstracts to the 3rd DSLDI workshop (DSLDI'15), and a summary of the panel discussion on Language Composition

Maintaining consistency in distributed systems

In systems designed as assemblies of independently developed components, concurrent access to data or data structures normally arises within individual programs, and is controlled using mutual exclusion constructs, such as semaphores and monitors. Where data is persistent and/or sets of operation are related to one another, transactions or linearizability may be more appropriate. Systems that incorporate cooperative styles of distributed execution often replicate or distribute data within groups of components. In these cases, group oriented consistency properties must be maintained, and tools based on the virtual synchrony execution model greatly simplify the task confronting an application developer. All three styles of distributed computing are likely to be seen in future systems - often, within the same application. This leads us to propose an integrated approach that permits applications that use virtual synchrony with concurrent objects that respect a linearizability constraint, and vice versa. Transactional subsystems are treated as a special case of linearizability

Life of occam-Pi

This paper considers some questions prompted by a brief review of the history of computing. Why is programming so hard? Why is concurrency considered an “advanced” subject? What’s the matter with Objects? Where did all the Maths go? In searching for answers, the paper looks at some concerns over fundamental ideas within object orientation (as represented by modern programming languages), before focussing on the concurrency model of communicating processes and its particular expression in the occam family of languages. In that focus, it looks at the history of occam, its underlying philosophy (Ockham’s Razor), its semantic foundation on Hoare’s CSP, its principles of process oriented design and its development over almost three decades into occam-? (which blends in the concurrency dynamics of Milner’s ?-calculus). Also presented will be an urgent need for rationalisation – occam-? is an experiment that has demonstrated significant results, but now needs time to be spent on careful review and implementing the conclusions of that review. Finally, the future is considered. In particular, is there a future

A generic framework for context-sensitive analysis of modular programs

Context-sensitive analysis provides information which is potentially more accurate than that provided by context-free analysis. Such information can then be applied in order to validate/debug the program and/or to specialize the program obtaining important improvements. Unfortunately, context-sensitive analysis of modular programs poses important theoretical and practical problems. One solution, used in several proposals, is to resort to context-free analysis. Other proposals do address context-sensitive analysis, but are only applicable when the description domain used satisfies rather restrictive properties. In this paper, we argüe that a general framework for context-sensitive analysis of modular programs, Le., one that allows using all the domains which have proved useful in practice in the non-modular setting, is indeed feasible and very useful. Driven by our experience in the design and implementation of analysis and specialization techniques in the context of CiaoPP, the Ciao system preprocessor, in this paper we discuss a number of design goals for context-sensitive analysis of modular programs as well as the problems which arise in trying to meet these goals. We also provide a high-level description of a framework for analysis of modular programs which does substantially meet these objectives. This framework is generic in that it can be instantiated in different ways in order to adapt to different contexts. Finally, the behavior of the different instantiations w.r.t. the design goals that motivate our work is also discussed

Research in nonlinear structural and solid mechanics

Recent and projected advances in applied mechanics, numerical analysis, computer hardware and engineering software, and their impact on modeling and solution techniques in nonlinear structural and solid mechanics are discussed. The fields covered are rapidly changing and are strongly impacted by current and projected advances in computer hardware. To foster effective development of the technology perceptions on computing systems and nonlinear analysis software systems are presented

Exploiting replication in distributed systems

Techniques are examined for replicating data and execution in directly distributed systems: systems in which multiple processes interact directly with one another while continuously respecting constraints on their joint behavior. Directly distributed systems are often required to solve difficult problems, ranging from management of replicated data to dynamic reconfiguration in response to failures. It is shown that these problems reduce to more primitive, order-based consistency problems, which can be solved using primitives such as the reliable broadcast protocols. Moreover, given a system that implements reliable broadcast primitives, a flexible set of high-level tools can be provided for building a wide variety of directly distributed application programs

Developing a distributed electronic health-record store for India

The DIGHT project is addressing the problem of building a scalable and highly available information store for the Electronic Health Records (EHRs) of the over one billion citizens of India