A Concurrent Language with a Uniform Treatment of Regions and Locks

A challenge for programming language research is to design and implement multi-threaded low-level languages providing static guarantees for memory safety and freedom from data races. Towards this goal, we present a concurrent language employing safe region-based memory management and hierarchical locking of regions. Both regions and locks are treated uniformly, and the language supports ownership transfer, early deallocation of regions and early release of locks in a safe manner

Supporting Separate Compilation in a Defunctionalizing Compiler

Defunctionalization is generally considered a whole-program transformation and thus incompatible with separate compilation. In this paper, we formalize a modular variant of defunctionalization which can support separate compilation. Our technique allows modules in a Haskell-like language to be separately defunctionalized and compiled, then linked together to generate an executable program. We provide a prototype implementation of our modular defunctionalization technique and we discuss the experiences of its application in a compiler from a large subset of Haskell to low-level C code, based on the intensional transformation

A Type System for Unstructured Locking that Guarantees Deadlock Freedom without Imposing a Lock Ordering

Deadlocks occur in concurrent programs as a consequence of cyclic resource acquisition between threads. In this paper we present a novel type system that guarantees deadlock freedom for a language with references, unstructured locking primitives, and locks which are implicitly associated with references. The proposed type system does not impose a strict lock acquisition order and thus increases programming language expressiveness.Comment: In Proceedings PLACES 2010, arXiv:1110.385