Panini Programming Language

Chapter 1
Overview

Its a pity that engineering correct and efficient concurrent software remains a daunting task in this second decade of the 21st century. Programming language support for engineering concurrency-safe programs by construction in modern mainstream languages is inadequate at best. Even if we are to ignore the fact that deploying external tool support for verifying concurrency safety properties requires an additional step in the toolchain, such tools have had limited applicability due to the unbridled concurrency power of modern mainstream languages.

Prevailing dynamics has been that the research on and development of programming languages and that of tool support are in non-cooperative roles, which ultimately hurts productivity of software engineers.

The Panini programming language is an attempt to design concerted support for concurrency in both programming models and compile-time checking. Specifically, the project has four goals:

1. Simplifying concurrency support, while interesting patterns of concurrent program design are of significant intellectual interest to select few, we believe that simple constructs suffice for most needs,
2. ease the process of visualizing the interactions between the components, in order to make design decisions about concurrency and synchronization,
3. ease the process of producing safer concurrent programs by construction by providing automated, in-built support for error checking, and
4. ease the process of reasoning and understanding concurrent programs by significantly decreasing the number of program locations that necessitate reasoning about concurrent tasks.

To satisfy these goals, the Panini language proposes a programming model called capsule-oriented programming, where programmers describe a system in terms of its modular structure and write sequential code to implement the operations of those modules using a new abstraction that we call capsule. Capsule-oriented programs look like familiar sequential programs but they are implicitly concurrent. This programming guide describes Panini, the motivation behind the language in more detail, its main constructs and features, common programming patterns in the programming language, and finally installing and running Panini programs.

If you are completely new to the Panini programming language, you may want to read our guide on how to get started in chapter 3 or look at one of our examples in part III.