Reactive, parallel and concurrent programming in F# (PADL 2011)

Don Syme blogged about a paper on the F# Asynchrounous Programming Model that I helped to write. Without any doubt, the asynchronous programming features of F# are one of the reason for its success and also influence other teams in Microsoft. However, I'm very glad that there is now also an academic paper that makes this idea accessible to the academic community. I believe that the ideas could evolve in interesting ways when used in other programming languages and also, it is now easier to create research projects that build on top of the F# model.

Don already mentioned that we have another paper accepted at PADL. The paper describes work that started during my internship at Microsoft Research in 2009. It presents a simple language extension for computation expressions that makes them even more useful in some reactive, concurrent and parallel programming models. Note that this is only a research project and there are currently no plans to support the extension in the F# language (although, if there will, eventually, be an open-source F# release, then you'll hear about the extension again...)

Here is the abstract of the paper (accepted at PADL 2011) and a PDF download link:

Joinads: A retargetable control-flow construct for reactive, parallel and concurrent programming

Modern challenges led to a design of a wide range of programming models for reactive, parallel and concurrent programming, but these are often difficult to encode in general purpose languages. We present an abstract type of computations called joinads together with a syntactic language extension that aims to make it easier to use joinads in modern functional languages.

Our extension generalizes pattern matching to work on abstract computations. It keeps a familiar syntax and semantics of pattern matching making it easy to reason about code, even in a non-standard programming model. We demonstrate our extension using three important programming models – a reactive model based on events; a concurrent model based on join calculus and a parallel model using futures. All three models are implemented as libraries that benefit from our syntactic extension. This makes them easier to use and also opens space for exploring new useful programming models.

• Download the full text (PDF, pre-publication draft)

The paper can still be revised before the final publication, so any comments and suggestions for improvement are largely welcome. You can contact me either via comments (below) or using email at tomas@tomasp.net. I would be also quite interested to hear from anybody who would like to implement similar feature in other programming languages (for example Haskell or Scala).