From Lambda the Ultimate:
E Thesis: Robust Composition
Mark S. Miller's PhD thesis on Robust Composition: Towards a Unified Approach to Access Control and Concurrency Control is now online.
E rates as a (very) important language for anyone interested in ideas of messaging, distribution and security. The nice thing about a thesis (such as this one and Joe Armstrong's) is that it gives a nice historical account of the related work and influences.When separately written programs are composed so that they may cooperate, they may instead destructively interfere in unanticipated ways. These hazards limit the scale and functionality of the software systems we can successfully compose. This dissertation presents a framework for enabling those interactions between components needed for the cooperation we intend, while minimizing the hazards of destructive interference.
Great progress on the composition problem has been made within the object paradigm, chiefly in the context of sequential, single-machine programming among benign components. We show how to extend this success to support robust composition of concurrent and potentially malicious components distributed over potentially malicious machines. We present E, a distributed, persistent, secure programming language, and CapDesk, a virus-safe desktop built in E, as embodiments of the techniques we explain.
And from Joe Armstrong SICS home page: "Programming reliable systems (Ph.D. thesis)
making reliable systems in the presence of software errors.
Here are some ideas on how to make reliable systems that function even in the presence of software errors. This thesis describes the thinking behind Erlang, Concurrency Oriented Programing, UBF and building reliable systems from communicating components."
From Erlang:
Related links:
