Explicit Fusions: Theory and Implementation
Lucian Wischik · 2001
This work describes a concurrent, distributed abstract machine for the pi calculus. Its primary audience are researchers in the field of concurrency. The secondary audience are working programmers looking for a better way to write interactive programs. This audience need only read Chapters 1 (an overview) and 5 (the implementation). I hope that these chapters might prove appealing to students wishing to implement the pi calculus, perhaps as a course project. The pi calculus of Milner, Parrow and Walker [47] is a widely studied formalism for describing interactive and concurrent systems. Its basic mechanism is synchronous message-passing over a channel: (1) One program signals its readiness to transmit some data over a channel; (2) Another program signals its readiness to receive over that channel; (3) When it has been established that two programs are ready to communicate, they do. I introduce a new model for synchronous rendezvous—using explicit fusions. ‘Fusion ’ means that, during communication, the data is temporarily shared between