Abstract

: Support for the engineering of complex distributed software presents a challenge to the designers of high-level programming languages. A trade-off between safety, ease-of-use, flexibility and performance must be considered. Remote procedure call (RPC), via statically generated stub procedures, is the current standard technology for communication in client-server distributed systems. RPC favours ease of use and safety at expense of performance and flexibility. Other mechanisms, such as the context handles of OSF's Distributed Computing Environment (DCE), offer greater flexibility at the expense of ease-of-use, performance and safety. In order to maximize performance with current technology, software engineers may be forced to employ lower level communication mechanisms, leading to decreased confidence in system safety and increased software complexity. In this paper we introduce a mechanism called responsibilities, which provides the same degree of safety and ease of use as RPC while ...

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