An Actor-Based Framework for Real-Time Coordination
Shangping Ren · 1997
Programming language research should be driven by the needs of specific application domains, such as real-time embedded systems, multimedia, distributed data-base management applications, etc. For instance, most often large real-time applications involve distributed and concurrently but asynchronously operating devices. The correctness of the integrated systems depends not only on the correct operation of each individual device, but also on the correct coordination among these devices. Furthermore, the correctness of device operation and cooperation requires that both the underlying logical computation be correct and the computation satisfy some notion of quantitative timing requirements. This thesis is a case study for how a language should be designed to suit a specific application domain. Specifically, I have designed RTsynchronizers (Real Time Synchronizers), a high-level programming language abstraction for specifying real-time coordination constraints between objects in a distrib...