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3. Which Concepts for Concurrent and Parallel Progr. does a VM need to Support?
meta-circular implementation, which makes primitives and their use directly
identifiable in the code.
3.1.2. Results
Structure of the Discussion This section first discusses the VMs supporting
Threads & Locks (T&L), then the ones with support for Communicating Threads
(ComT), and finally the ones supporting Communication Isolates (ComI) (cf.
Sec. 2.4.1). In the case a VM supports more than a single category, the discussions
for the different categories build on each other. The category of Data
Parallelism (DPar) is not discussed because all VMs examined in this survey
relegate support for parallel programming to libraries. These libraries build
on lower-level mechanisms, which are concurrent programming concepts on
their own and are used for other purposes as well.
The remainder of this section discusses the survey questions and highlights
the concepts supported by the different VMs. A full overview of the survey is
given in Appendix A, Tab. A.2.
General Remarks Tab. 3.2 provides an overview of the categorization of the
various VMs. Furthermore, while three of the VMs can be categorized as
belonging to two categories, most of the VMs focus on supporting a single
category of concurrency-related mechanisms.
VM T&L ComT ComI DPar
CLI X X Lib
Dalvik X Lib
DisVM
X
ECMAScript+HTML5
X
Erlang
X
GHC X Lib
JVM X Lib
Mozart X X
Perl
X
Python X X
Ruby
X
Self
X
Squeak
X
Table 3.2.: Categories of approaches supported by VMs: Threads & Locks (T&L),
Communicating Threads (ComT), Communicating Isolates (ComI), and Data
Parallelism (DPar)
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