here - Stefan-Marr.de

1. Introduction
of solutions for different application domains, none of the VMs provide sufficient
support for these techniques, and thus, application developers cannot
benefit from these solutions. Furthermore, current research [Catanzaro et al.,
2010; Chafi et al., 2010] indicates that there is no one-size-fits-all solution to
handle the complexity of concurrent and parallel programming, and therefore,
application developers are best served with access to the whole field of
solutions.
Domain-specific languages are one promising way to alleviate the complexity
of concurrent and parallel programming. While the academic community
continuously proposes abstractions that facilitate certain use cases, reduce the
accidental complexity, and potentially provide improved performance, language
implementers struggle to build these abstractions on top of today’s
VMs, because the rudimentary mechanisms such multi-language VMs provide
are insufficient and require the language implementers to trade off implementation
simplicity, correctly implemented language semantics, and performance.
The goal of this dissertation is to improve the support VMs provide for concurrent
and parallel programming in order to enable language implementers
to build a wide range of language abstractions on top of multi-language VMs.
1.1. Research Context
The research presented in this dissertation touches upon the domains of concurrent
and parallel programming as well as on virtual machine construction. The
main concerns of these domains are the following:
Concurrent and Parallel Programming Today, an overwhelmingly large body
of literature describes a wide range of different concepts to manage
concurrency, coordinate parallel activities, protect shared resources, describe
data dependencies for efficient computation, etc. Already with
the first computers, i. e., the Zuse Z3 [Rojas, 1997] and the ENIAC [Mitch
and Atsushi, 1996], researchers have experimented with such concepts
for concurrent and parallel programming, but never came close to a
one-size-fits-all solution.
Virtual Machine Construction Software developers widely adopted high-level
language VMs such as the JVM and the CLI as multi-language runtimes,
because the research on just-in-time compilation [Aycock, 2003]
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