An Implementation of the Vat Programming Abstraction

When the hardware industry hit the power-wall around the year 2005,increasing computer performance through increasing the clock-speed wasno longer a practical option. The only practical way to ensure increasingperformance where to start using multi core CPUs. This shifted the bur-den of computing performance to the programmer. But with parallel pro-gramming came many problems due to concurrent programmings inherentlack of causality. Reactive programming is a programming paradigm forconcurrent programming that provides a layer for abstracting away theintricacies of handling external concurrent events.In this thesis we have been implementing and examining Vats which isa reactive storage abstraction that offers to provide safety and a flexible way ofgoverning behavior and synchronization of data flow in an event driven program. Wehave made some comparisons between Vats and other known storage abstractionsfor reactive programming and we have also used Vats to implement the generation ofscale free graphs in order to see how they can be used to solve actual problems.This thesis contains the first ever implementation and application ofVats and as such no firm conclusions can be drawn regarding their power andusefulness, but during this implementation and evaluation, no major shortcomings orissues that could not be fixed have been encountered. The brief comparison betweenVats and the other known reactive storage constructs gives an indications that Vatshave a greater expressive power than the constructs compared against. The issuesthat where resolved during the implementation of Vats have provided a betterunderstanding of how Vats are to work as a practical tool for programmers. Eventhough we draw no conclusions about Vats in this thesis we do find that they areconceptually sound and that further testing and implementation wouldnot be a waste of time