Abstract

. The remote service request, a form of remote procedure call, and the global pointer, a global naming mechanism, are two features at the heart of Nexus, a library for building distributed systems. NeXeme is an extension of Scheme that fully integrates both concepts in a mostly-functional framework, hence providing an expressive language for distributed computing. This paper presents a semantics for this Scheme extension, and also describes a NeXeme implementation, including its distributed garbage collector. 1 Introduction Scheme [20] is a mostly-functional language, i.e., it is a fully functional language that also supports imperative notions such as assignments and continuations, for efficiency and expressivity reasons. We believe that a distributed extension of such a language requires a mechanism to invoke functions remotely, so that distribution becomes part of the most fundamental operation of the language. Such an approach is also adopted by languages such as Obliq [2], Java +...

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