This paper aims at providing confluence and determinism properties in concurrent processes, more specifically within the paradigm of object-oriented systems. Such results should allow one to program parallel and distributed applications that behave in a deterministic manner, even if they are distributed over local or wide area networks. For that purpose, an object calculus is proposed. Its key characteristics are asynchronous communications with futures, and sequential execution within each process. While

This document presents an object language that allows one to program parallel and distributed applications that behave in a deterministic manner, even if they are distributed over local or wide area networks. An object

We report on a case study in the application of partial evaluation, initiated by the desire to speed up a constraint-based algorithm for controlflow analysis. We designed and implemented a dedicated partial evaluator, able to specialize the analysis wrt. a given constraint graph and thus remove the interpretive overhead, and measured it with Feeley’s Scheme benchmarks. Even though the gain turned out to be rather limited, our investigation yielded valuable feed back in that it provided a better understanding of the analysis, leading us to (re)invent an incremental version. We believe this phenomenon to be a quite frequent spinoff from using partial evaluation, since the removal of interpretive overhead makes the flow of control more explicit and hence pinpoints sources of inefficiency. Finally, we observed that partial evaluation in our case yields such regular, low-level specialized programs that it begs for runtime code generation. 1

This paper presents a Java-like core language with primitives for object-oriented distribution and explicit code mobility. We apply our formulation to prove the correctness of several optimisations for distributed programs. Our language captures crucial but often hidden aspects of distributed object-oriented programming, including object serialisation, dynamic class downloading and remote method invocation. It is defined in terms of an operational semantics that concisely models the behaviour of distributed programs using machinery from calculi of mobile processes. Type safety is established using invariant properties for distributed runtime configurations. We argue that primitives for explicit code mobility offer a programmer fine-grained control of type-safe code distribution, which is crucial for improving the performance and safety of distributed object-oriented applications.