CSCI-6500 Final Project Proposal Actor Domain Language Design and Implementation

Concurrent programming is hard. One of the most important reasons is nowadays’ popular programming languages are heavily relied on shared memory for currency. Although shared memory approach is efficient and easy for transaction control, it also leads to the problem of deadlocks, race conditions, etc. In addition, it does not quite fit for distributed computing and web services, which are inherently concurrent. Actor Model [1], on the other hand, gives an alternative for concurrency. Actors share nothing, and only communicate via messages. It is good for programmers since they don’t need to worry about locks anymore. Also, it is born for concurrency, thus well fitting for Miltie-core processors and distributed computing. However, it is inefficient for sharing nothing if actors all locates in a single machine. A typical example is the ant colony optimization simulation, where a large number of autonomous entities have to communicate with a constantly changing environment. On the other hand, coordination and transaction control are not easy as well. Hence, we propose the Actor Domain(AD), a programming language that mixes shared memory concurrency and Actor Model concurrency.