ActiveJava

Copyright Tristan Aubrey-Jones May 2008.

Abstract: A project investigating and developing an implicitly concurrent programming language, based on a metaphor taken from the physical world is reported. Uses a programming paradigm where programs consist of systems of autonomous agents, or active objects which communicate via message passing. A language enhancing Java with actors and linear types is presented. Example programs are written, compiled, and executed to evaluate the usefulness of the language. The language found to provide a familiar notation for implicit parallelism, and a compelling new model for concurrency, combining the performance of shared variables with the elegance of message passing.

Introductory Slides (PDF), Report (PDF),
ActiveJava compiler prototype (ajavac), ActiveJava runtime library (ajava_lang).

Examples:

calc - pocket calculator actor program
dining - dining philosophers actor program (never deadlocks)
sort - parallel quicksort implementation ("SortBenchmark" sorts 10,000 random integers using actors, java threads, and sequentially and compares)
To compile examples use:
compile.bat ./calc
compile.bat ./sort
compile.bat ./dining
To run examples use:
run ./calc Main
run ./dining Main
run ./dining Main fast
run ./sort Main
run ./sort SortingBenchmark

AOpPad.ajava

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import javax.swing.*; import java.awt.*; import java.awt.event.*; public aclass AOpPad extends AContainer { protected final GridLayout layout; protected final ACharButton[] buttons; public final Event OnClick = new Event(); public AOpPad() { // create panel super(new JPanel()); layout = new GridLayout(3,2); container.setLayout(layout); buttons = new ACharButton[10]; createButtons(); } private void createButtons() { createButton('/'); createButton('*'); createButton('-'); createButton('+'); createButton('^'); createButton('='); } private byte index = 0; private void createButton(char op) { buttons[index] = new ACharButton(op); buttons[index].OnClick <-- new Event.Subscribe(OnClick); buttons[index].OnKeyTyped <-- new Event.Subscribe(OnKeyTyped); this <-- new AddComponent(buttons[index]); index++; } }