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1.3. Research Goals
1.3. Research Goals
The thesis of this dissertation is:
There exists a relevant and significant subset of concurrent and parallel
programming concepts that can be realized on top of a unifying substrate.
This substrate enables the flexible definition of language semantics that
build on the identified set of concepts, and this substrate lends itself to an
efficient implementation.
This dissertation pursues the following research goals in support of this
thesis:
Identify a Set of Requirements First, this dissertation has to examine how
concurrency and parallelism are supported in VMs today, how the underlying
concepts for concurrent and parallel programming relate to
each other, and which problems occur when building higher-level abstractions
on top of today’s VMs. The resulting understanding of the
state of the art and common problems enable the establishment of a set
of requirements that guide the implementation of such concepts on top
of a VM.
Define a Unifying Substrate Based on the set of requirements identified in
the first step, this dissertation has to defines an abstraction that can
serve as a unifying substrate for the implementation of a significant subset
of concurrent and parallel programming concepts. This abstraction
has to enable library and language implementers to customize semantics
and guarantees for the programming concepts they want to provide,
while preserving acceptable performance. Since complexity is an inherent
issue for VM implementations, the abstraction has to demonstrate
unifying characteristics. Thus, it has to generalize over a set of programming
concepts to achieve abstraction, while avoiding adding independent,
i. e., separate, support for each of the programming concepts to
the VM.
Demonstrate Applicability This dissertation has to demonstrate the applicability
of the proposed unifying substrate as an extension to high-level
language VMs in order to show its benefits for building multi-language
runtimes. The evaluation is based on the implementation of common
abstractions for concurrent programming on top of the proposed substrate.
The goal is to show the substrate’s potential compared to classic
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