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6. Evaluation: The OMOP as a Unifying Substrate
6.6. Conclusion
The goal of this chapter was to assess to what extent the OMOP satisfies its
requirements to support the thesis statement, and to discuss how the research
goal is reached.
Case studies of Clojure agents, STM, and event-loop actors demonstrate
how common implementation challenges are solved and how the OMOP
fulfills its requirements. Sec. 6.2 demonstrates how Clojure agents, software
transactional memory, and AmbientTalk’s actors can be implemented on top
of the OMOP. Furthermore, it showes how the parts of their implementation
map to the OMOP and how they relate to the stated requirements of Tab. 3.7.
The case studies also demonstrate how common implementation challenges
such as isolation, scheduling guarantees, immutability, and reflection can be
approached with the OMOP.
OMOP facilitates the implementation of all 18 concepts that require semantic
enforcement from the VM. Sec. 6.3 shows that the OMOP facilitates the
implementation of all 18 concepts. It provides full support for 9 concepts and
solves implementation challenges for the remaining 9 concepts. It does so
by providing flexible mechanisms to customize state access and method execution
policies. Therefore, language implementers benefit substantially from
this support provided by the OMOP.
The OMOP can lead to more concise implementations with full guarantee
enforcement. Sec. 6.4 demonstrates that the use of the OMOP does not
have a negative impact on implementation size. On the contrary, it indicates
that the OMOP can facilitate the implementation of concurrency concepts in
such a way that their implementation size is reduced. In conclusion, the abstractions
provided by the OMOP are appropriate for the implementation of
Clojure agents, active objects, actors, CSP, and STM.
The OMOP is applicable, supports relevant concepts, is novel, the support
set of concepts is significant, and it is a unifying and minimal substrate.
Sec. 6.5 discusses the remaining evaluation criteria. The case studies indicate
the flexibility of the OMOP in solving common implementation challenges
and show its applicability. To conclude, the OMOP provides the flexibility to
reach beyond today’s concurrent programming concepts, because guarantees
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