A Tour of Gallifrey, a Language for Geodistributed Programming
Mae Milano, Rolph Recto, Tom Magrino, and Andrew C. Myers

SNAPL 2019
May 2019, Providence, Rhode Island, USA

Abstract:

Programming efficient distributed, concurrent systems requires new abstractions that go beyond traditional sequential programming. But programmers already have trouble getting sequential code right, so simplicity is essential. The core problem is that low-latency, high-availability access to data requires replication of mutable state. Keeping replicas fully consistent is expensive, so the question is how to expose asynchronously replicated objects to programmers in a way that allows them to reason simply about their code. We propose an answer to this question in our ongoing work designing a new language, Gallifrey, which provides orthogonal replication through restrictions with merge strategies, contingencies for conflicts arising from concurrency, and branches, a novel concurrency control construct inspired by version control, to contain provisional behavior.

The final paper is not yet ready for distribution. It will be made available from this page.