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Programming with Managed Time

Published: 14 October 2014 Publication History

Abstract

Most languages expose the computer's ability to globally read and write memory at any time. Programmers must then choreograph control flow so all reads and writes occur in correct relative orders, which can be difficult particularly when dealing with initialization, reactivity, and concurrency. Just as many languages now manage memory to unburden us from properly freeing memory, they should also manage time to automatically order memory accesses for us in the interests of comprehensibility, correctness, and simplicity. Time management is a general language feature with a large design space that is largely unexplored; we offer this perspective to relate prior work and guide future research.
We introduce Glitch as a form of managed time that replays code for an appearance of simultaneous memory updates, avoiding the need for manual order. The key to such replay reaching consistent program states is an ability to reorder and rollback updates as needed, restricting the imperative model while retaining the basic concepts of memory access and control flow. This approach can also handle code to enable live programming that incrementally revises program executions in an IDE under arbitrary code changes.

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cover image ACM Conferences
Onward! 2014: Proceedings of the 2014 ACM International Symposium on New Ideas, New Paradigms, and Reflections on Programming & Software
October 2014
332 pages
ISBN:9781450332101
DOI:10.1145/2661136
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 14 October 2014

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  1. live programming
  2. programming models

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