Peter Van Roy, Professor at Université catholique de Louvain

Peter Van Roy is coauthor of the classic programming textbook "Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming" and professor at the Université catholique de Louvain in Belgium. His group hosts the Mozart Programming System, with which he explores how programming languages can simplify distributed programming. In a previous century, he wrote the Aquarius Prolog compiler, the first to generate code competitive in performance with C compilers, and the Macintosh application FractaSketch, the first to allow true graphic design based on fractal geometry. He received a M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley and a French "Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches" from the Université Paris Diderot (Paris 7).

Presentation: "Ozma: Extending Scala with Oz Concurrency"

Track: New Languages changing your world!

Time: Friday 15:35 - 16:35

Location: Olympic

Abstract:

This talk is a hands-on presentation of concurrent programming in Ozma, an extension of Scala that adds the concurrency features of Oz. Ozma is based on deterministic dataflow concurrency. This is extremely simple: 'val' variables in Ozma are single assignment and all operations can synchronize on this assignment. This extension has the incredible property that race conditions are impossible. Combined with lightweight threads, deterministic dataflow makes concurrent programming effortless; it is much simpler than any other model we know of. In addition, Ozma integrates both lazy execution and message passing with the dataflow concurrency. The Ozma design combines two pillars of advanced technology, namely Scala and Oz. Scala is based on Java technology and integrates object-oriented and functional features in a smooth way (see http://www.scala-lang.org). Oz is a research language that has explored language simplicity and power for over 20 years (see http://ctm.info.ucl.ac.be and http://www.mozart-oz.org). All necessary information to install and run Ozma is available on GitHub (see https://github.com/sjrd/ozma).