The Lynx Distributed Programming Language: Motivation, Design and Experience

A programming language can provide much better support for interprocess communication than a library package can. Most message-passing languages limit this support to communication between the pieces of a single program, but this need not be the case. Lynx facilitates convenient, typesafe message passing not only within applications, but also between applications, and among distributed collections of servers. Specifically, it addresses issues of compiler statelessness, late binding, and protection that allow run-time interaction between processes that were developed independently and that do not trust each other. Implementation experience with Lynx has yielded important insights into the relationship between distributed operating systems and language run-time support packages, and into the inherent costs of high-level message-passing semantics.