Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne

The stream programming paradigm aims to expose coarse-grained parallelism in applications that must process contin-uous sequences of events. The appeal of stream program-ming comes from its conceptual simplicity. A program is a collection of independent filters which communicate by the means of uni-directional data channels. This model lends it-self naturally to concurrent and efficient implementations on modern multiprocessors. As the output behavior of filters is determined by the state of their input channels, stream programs have fewer opportunities for the errors (such as data races and deadlocks) that plague shared memory con-current programming. This paper introduces STREAMFLEX, an extension to Java which marries streams with objects and thus enables to combine, in the same Java virtual machine