A Type-and-Effect System for Shared Memory, Concurrent Implicit Invocation Systems

Driven by the need to utilize multicore platforms, recent language designs aim to bring the concurrency advantages of events in distributed publish-subscribe systems to sequential OO programs that utilize the implicit invocation (II) design style. These proposals face two challenges. First, unlike the publish-subscribe paradigm where publisher and subscriber typically don\u27t share state, communicating via shared state is common in II programs. Second, type-and-effect systems that are generally designed for statically reasoning about a program\u27s execution are often too conservative to handle II that typically entails a virtual method invocation on zero or more dynamically registered handlers. To solve these problems, we present a novel hybrid type-and-effect system for exposing concurrency in programs that use II mechanisms. This type-and-effect system provides deadlock and data race freedom in such usage of II mechanisms. We have also implemented this type-and-effect system. An initial study shows its scalability benefits and acceptable costs