ProcessJ: A process-oriented programming language
Year: 2011
Type: dissertation
Abstract: Java is a general purpose object-oriented programming language that has been widely adopted. Because of its high adoption rate and its lineage as a C-style language, its syntax is familiar to many programmers. The downside is that Java is not natively concurrent. Volumes have been written about concurrent programming in Java; however, concurrent programming is difficult to reason about within an object-oriented paradigm and so is difficult to get right. occam -? is a general purpose process-oriented programming language. Concurrency is part of the theoretical underpinnings of the language. Concurrency is simple to reason about within an occam -? application because there is never any shared state; also occam -? is based on a process calculus, with algebraic laws for composing processes. It has well-defined semantics regarding how processes interact. The downside is that the syntax is foreign and even archaic to programmers who are used to the Java syntax. This thesis presents a new language, ProcessJ, which is a general purpose, process-oriented programming language meant to bridge the gap between Java and occam -?. ProcessJ does this by combining the familiar syntax of Java with the process semantics of occam -?. This allows for a familiar-looking language that is easy to reason about in concurrent programs. This thesis describes the ProcessJ language, as well as the implementation of a compiler that translates ProcessJ source code to Java with Java Communicating Sequential Processes (JCSP), a library that provides CSP-style communication primitives.
DOI: 10.34917/3294795
Author: Sowders, Matthew
Language: English
Subfield: Software
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W249929922