TCD-CS-93-37... Vinny Cahill, Sean Baker; Chris Horn and Gradimir Starovic Starovic G. & Cahill, V..

The Amadeus GRT - Generic Runtime Support for Distributed Persistent Programming


Distributed Systems Group,
Dept. of Computer Science, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland

Abstract

Many object-oriented programming language implementations have been extended to support persistence, distribution or atomicity by integrating the necessary additional support with the language's runtime library.

We argue that a better approach is to provide a Generic Runtime library (the GRT) which implements that part of the support which is independent of any language. The GRT should be designed to interface to a language's existing runtime in such a way that the language's local object reference format and invocation mechanism can be retained. Hence existing compilers do not necessarily have to be modified, and a range of different object-oriented languages can be supported simultaneously.

This approach has significant merits including: the ease with which a language can be extended; the sophistication of the underlying support immediately available to a language implementer; and the ability to support fine-grained language interworking.


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