Capsule-oriented programming

Capsule-oriented programming is a new programming style designed to address the challenges of concurrent programming. Main goal is to enable non-concurrency experts to write correct and efficient concurrent programs. If you are unfamiliar, the Panini programming guide explains the challenges of writing correct and efficient concurrent programs.

A central goal of this programming style is to provide tools to enable programmers to simply do what they do best, that is, to describe a system in terms of its modular structure and write sequential code to implement the operations of those modules. To achieve this, capsule-oriented programming introduces a new abstraction called capsule. A capsule is similar to a process; it defines a set of public operations, and also serves as a memory region for some set of ordinary objects.

One goal in capsule-oriented programming is that the programmer should get the benefits of asynchronous execution without being forced to adapt to an asynchronous, message-passing style of programming. To the programmer, inter-capsule calls look like ordinary method calls. Capsule-oriented programs are implicitly concurrent. There are no explicit threads or synchronization locks; if necessary or beneficial, concurrency is introduced by the compiler. Capsule-oriented programming eliminates two classes of concurrency errors: sequential inconsistency and race conditions due to shared data.

Audience

Who can benefit? Capsule-oriented programming is a suitable approach for programmers who don't want to be distracted by concurrency concerns so that they can focus on their software's logic. If you want your programming language to take care of your concurrency concerns just like Java and C# handles your memory management concerns then capsules-oriented programming is for you.

Who may NOT benefit? Capsule-oriented programming may not be a suitable approach for a software project if it is preferred in that project to manage every aspect of concurrency manually. This is similar to why Java and C# are not suitable, if a software project requires manual memory management and explicit pointer arithmetic.

The Panini language

Panini is a capsule-oriented programming language whose goals are to ease development of correct, scalable, and portable concurrent software. See below for origin of the name. PaniniJ, in particular, is a capsule-oriented extension of the Java programming language that runs on the standard JVM platform. Panini provides new, implicitly concurrent, modularization mechanisms. If programmers use these mechanisms to structure their software system to improve modularity in its design, they get implicit concurrency at the boundaries of these mechanisms. Modularization leads to improved concurrency. The language thus encompasses fundamental and practical efforts to unify modularization and parallelization mechanisms.

Design goals

Panini has the following main design goals:

• Improve modularity, while exposing implicit concurrency in software design leading to improved utilization of emerging multicore and manycore platforms.
• Support sequential consistency and data race freedom in the presence of implicit concurrency.
• Enable separate type-checking, compilation, and modular reasoning of both sequential and concurrent code.

All these goals are important for building correct, scalable, and portable software systems in the multicore/manycore/cloud era but harder to achieve in current programming languages.

Origin of name

The language takes its name from Panini (fl.c.400 BC), an Indian grammarian, known for his formulation of the Sanskrit grammar rules (the earliest work on linguistics). If you are completely new to the idea and the Panini project, you may want to read our overview.

Page last modified on $Date: 2013/08/15 06:24:35 $