Reactive Async : Safety and efficiency of new abstractions for reactive, asynchronous programming

Abstract: Futures and Promises have become an essential part of asynchronous programming. However, they have important limitations, allowing at most one result and no support for cyclic dependencies, instead resulting in deadlocks. Reactive Async is a prototype of an event-based asynchronous parallel programming model that extends the functionality of Futures and Promises, supporting refinement of results according to an application-specific lattice. Furthermore, it allows for completion of cyclic dependencies through quiescence detection of a thread pool. The thesis demonstrates the practical applicability of Reactive Async by applying the model to a large static analysis framework, OPAL. Benchmarks comparing Reactive Async with Futures and Promises show an efficiency trade-off for the flexibility of using the model.