Abstract:

Distributed concurrent programming, such as that found in applications like airline reservation systems and other wide-area computing applications, face a number of issues, like persistent storage management, sequential computational logic for performing computations, and the orchestration of those computations. We introduce the language Orc for orchestrating the calculations. Orc has 3 combinators: symmetric composition, pipes, and asymmetric parallel composition. We demonstrate how other concurrent programming features such as fork-join parallelism, the interrupt, and time-out can be written in Orc. And we investigate the semantics of Orc: we show which laws of Kleene Algebra hold and don't hold, provide inference rules, and discuss executions and traces.

Slides