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SPLASH 2017
Sun 22 - Fri 27 October 2017 Vancouver, Canada
Thu 26 Oct 2017 11:15 - 11:37 at Regency A - Types and Language Design Chair(s): Mario Wolczko

ORCA is a concurrent and parallel garbage collector for actor programs, which does not require any STW steps, or synchronization mechanisms, and that has been designed to support zero-copy message passing and sharing of mutable data. ORCA is part of a runtime for actor-based languages, which was co-designed with the Pony programming language, and in particular, with its data race free type system. By co-designing an actor language with its runtime, it was possible to exploit certain language properties in order to optimize performance of garbage collection. Namely, ORCA relies on the guarantees of absence of race conditions in order to avoid read/write barriers, and it leverages the actor message passing, for synchronization among actors.

In this paper we briefly describe Pony and its type system. We use pseudo-code in order to introduce how ORCA allocates and deallocates objects, how it shares mutable data without requiring barriers upon data mutation, and how can immutability be used to further optimize garbage collection. Moreover, we discuss the advantages of co-designing an actor language with its runtime, and we demonstrate that ORCA can be implemented in a performant and scalable way through a set of micro-benchmarks, including a comparison with other well-known collectors.

Thu 26 Oct

Displayed time zone: Tijuana, Baja California change

10:30 - 12:00
Types and Language DesignOOPSLA at Regency A
Chair(s): Mario Wolczko Oracle Labs
10:30
22m
Talk
Familia: Unifying Interfaces, Type Classes, and Family Polymorphism
OOPSLA
Yizhou Zhang Cornell University, Andrew Myers
DOI
10:52
22m
Talk
Static Stages for Heterogeneous Programming
OOPSLA
Adrian Sampson Cornell University, Kathryn S McKinley Google, Todd Mytkowicz Microsoft Research
DOI Pre-print
11:15
22m
Talk
Orca: GC and Type System Co-Design for Actor Languages
OOPSLA
Sylvan Clebsch Imperial College London, Juliana Franco Imperial College London, Sophia Drossopoulou , Albert Mingkun Yang , Tobias Wrigstad Uppsala University, Jan Vitek Northeastern University, USA
DOI
11:37
22m
Talk
Monadic Composition for Deterministic, Parallel Batch Processing
OOPSLA
Ryan Scott Indiana University, Omar Navarro-Leija University of Pennsylvania, USA, Ryan R. Newton Indiana University, Joseph Devietti University of Pennsylvania
DOI