Introducing Objects and Parallelism to an Imperative Programming Language

The problem of enhancing objects with parallelism has been in the focus of numerous research projects in the recent years, but a satisfactory and commonly accepted solution has not appeared yet. A major problematic point seems to be providing inheritance for parallel objects. The general objective of this paper is to contribute to a better understanding of the language design issues in the area of parallel object-oriented programming (OOP) and, in particular, to design a framework for parallel OOP with multiple inheritance. What makes our proposed framework different from the other parallel OOP languages is its easy to use and efficient multiple inheritance for parallel objects. Our framework is easy-to-use because it is designed as a minimal parallel and OOP enhancement of the imperative programming paradigm—a paradigm which is relatively simple, very popular, and well understood. It is efficient for the same reasons and because the implementation of dynamic binding in our proposed multiple inheritance scheme does not require run-time method tables. Dozens of known serial and parallel OOP languages employ run-time method tables which may impose significant space and time overhead, particularly in a parallel environment