AmbientTalk: programming responsive mobile peer-to-peer applications with actors

The rise of mobile computing platforms has given rise to a new class of applications: mobile applications that interact with peer applications running on neighbouring phones. Developing such applications is challenging because of problems inherent to concurrent and distributed pro-gramming, and because of problems inherent to mobile networks, such as the fact that wireless network connectivity is often intermittent, and the lack of centralized infrastructure to coordinate the peers. We present AmbientTalk, a distributed programming language designed specifically to de-velop mobile peer-to-peer applications. AmbientTalk aims to make it easy to develop mobile applications that are resilient to network failures by design. We describe the language’s concur-rency and distribution model in detail, as it lies at the heart of AmbientTalk’s support for respon-sive, resilient application development. The model is based on communicating event loops, itself a descendant of the actor model. We contribute a small-step operational semantics for this model and use it to establish data race and deadlock freedom