Continuation-passing C, compiling threads to events through continuations

DOI10.1007/S10990-012-9084-5MaRDI QIDQ1929338zbMATH OpenOpenAlexFDO

Authors Gabriel Kerneis, Juliusz Chroboczek

Publication date 8 January 2013

Published in Higher-Order and Symbolic Computation (Search for Journal in Brave)

Full work available at URL https://arxiv.org/abs/1011.4558

zbMATH Keywords

concurrent programmingcontinuation-passing stylelambda-lifting

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Theory of programming languages (68N15) Theory of compilers and interpreters (68N20) Other programming paradigms (object-oriented, sequential, concurrent, automatic, etc.) (68N19)

Abstract: In this paper, we introduce Continuation Passing C (CPC), a programming language for concurrent systems in which native and cooperative threads are unified and presented to the programmer as a single abstraction. The CPC compiler uses a compilation technique, based on the CPS transform, that yields efficient code and an extremely lightweight representation for contexts. We provide a proof of the correctness of our compilation scheme. We show in particular that lambda-lifting, a common compilation technique for functional languages, is also correct in an imperative language like C, under some conditions enforced by the CPC compiler. The current CPC compiler is mature enough to write substantial programs such as Hekate, a highly concurrent BitTorrent seeder. Our benchmark results show that CPC is as efficient, while using significantly less space, as the most efficient thread libraries available.

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Cites work

• scientific article; zbMATH DE number 1942456 (Why is no real title available?)
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• Monitors
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• Trampolined style

Cited in

(2)

• Continuation-passing C, compiling threads to events through continuations
• Compiling cooperative task management to continuations

Describes a project that uses

Uses Software

• Kilim
• ALGOL 60
• CIL
• Lwt

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