Generic operations and capabilities in the JR concurrent programming language

The JR concurrent programming language extends Java with additional concurrency mechanisms, which are built upon JR’s operations and capabilities. JR operations generalize methods in how they can be invoked and serviced. JR capabilities act as reference to operations. Recent changes to the Java language and implementation, especially generics, necessitated corresponding changes to the JR language and implementation. This paper describes the new JR language features (known as JR2) of generic operations and generic capabilities. These new features posed some interesting implementation challenges. The paper describes our initial implementation (JR21) of generic operations and capabilities, which works in many, but not all, cases. It then describes the approach our improved implementation (JR24) uses to fully implement generic operations and capabilities. The paper also describes the benchmarks used to assess the compilation and execution time performances of JR21 and JR24. The JR24 implementation reduces compilation times, mainly due to reducing the number of files generated during JR program translation, without noticeably impacting execution times.