here - Stefan-Marr.de

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W H I C H C O N C E P T S F O R C O N C U R R E N T A N D PA R A L L E L
P R O G R A M M I N G D O E S A V M N E E D T O S U P P O RT ?
The goal of this chapter is to identify requirements for a unifying substrate
that supports parallel and concurrent programming. First, a survey of the
state of the art in VM support finds that support for parallel programming
is relegated to libraries, while concurrent programming is only supported selectively.
Thus, VM support is currently insufficient for supporting the notion
of a multi-language runtime for concurrent and parallel programming. Second,
a survey of the field of concurrent and parallel programming identifies
concepts that significantly benefit from VM support either for performance
improvement or to guarantee correct semantics. Based on these concepts, this
chapter derives general requirements for VMs, which cover two independent
areas of research. This dissertation focuses on the research to enforce language
semantics, and thus correctness, leaving the research on performance
improvement for future work. With this focus in mind, this chapter discusses
common problems of language implementers that need to be solved to improve
support for concurrent programming on multi-language VMs. Finally,
the survey results and discussed problems are used to extract concrete requirements
for the design of a unifying abstraction for concurrent programming.
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