The JCilk Multithreaded Language
I-Ting Angelina Lee · DSpace@MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) · 2005
JCilk is a Java-based multithreaded programming language which extends Java to provide a dynamic threading model. Specifically, JCilk imports Cilk’s fork-join prim-itives spawn and sync into Java to provide procedure-call semantics for concurrent subcomputations. More importantly, JCilk integrates exception handling with multi-threading by defining semantics consistent with Java’s existing semantics of exception handling. JCilk’s strategy of integrating multithreading with Java’s exception semantics yields some surprising semantic synergies. In particular, JCilk extends Java’s excep-tion semantics to allow exceptions to be passed from a spawned method to its parent in a natural way that obviates the need for Cilk’s inlet and abort constructs. This extension is “faithful ” in that it obeys Java’s ordinary serial semantics when executed on a single processor. When executed in parallel, however, an exception thrown by a JCilk computation signals its sibling computations to abort, yielding a clean se-mantics in which only a single exception from the enclosing try block is handled.